Richard Ha writes:

We are in Carmel, California right now for the Tomato Fest.

Normally on Sundays, I weigh myself at 8 a.m. and post the week’s results. However, I don’t have access to a scale here, or exercise equipment. Plus I’m going to need to taste as many tomato dishes as I can. There are going to be 60 chefs with dishes to sample and around 200 varieties of heirloom tomatoes.

I have no intention of holding back on trying whatever looks interesting. I’ll deal with the consequences later.

I plan to see where my weight loss program is at when we get home, and I’ll post about it next Sunday.

My resting heart rate is 54. Last week it was 52. A few beats either way is expected and so this is not indicative of a trend yet. I think the low 50s is good since I started out being too heavy to run. I have had to find other ways to exercise. An elliptical trainer and a mountain bike work for me. It appears that intensity—high heart rate training—is key to a lower heart rate.

I am now 61 years old, and I don’t feel any limitations in terms of accomplishing high levels of fitness just because of age. The challenge is to find the right combination of exercise and rest that will keep one improving at an optimum rate.

One of the reasons I know I can keep improving is because I’ve been doing a few dumbbell exercises with cardio all along. And now I can do dumbbell curls with heavier weights, and more reps and sets, than when I was into powerlifting.

I feel that a muscle is a muscle. They all work the same way. Just don’t overtrain.

I have some early observations on my ambitious 30-minute exercise plan, which involves different levels of intensity three times per week plus low level exercise on the other four days.

It is much harder than it appears. It seems that I cannot recover fast enough to stay on the three times per week schedule at a high intensity. I am thinking of modifying it so it’s an intense interval program twice per week, with the remaining days accumulating 500 calories at a low level—below 70 percent of max heart rate.

I think this can be done, because I was successful at power lifting by doing one intense training day per week for the major lifts. That, too, was a situation where it took a long time to recover. At that time, like now, the major caution was to avoid overtraining.

After the Tomato Fest, we plan to take a leisurely coastline drive from Carmel to Santa Maria, where we will visit our friend Judy Lundberg and her family. Judy owns Babe’ Farms, which is one of the premier specialty vegetable farms in the nation. I’ll tell you more about our trip on Wednesday.