A review of Brainsport's 100% Kenyan Roast Coffee

In the very recent past, Brainsport began offering coffee for sale at its store on 10th Street East. I make it a point of buying fair trade coffee from local businesses, so in buying coffee from Brainsport I am holding true to my beliefs.
I picked up a bag of their beans.  I should say at the outset because neither the weight nor volume are listed on the package, it's hard to make an educated guess as to whether the coffee is worth buying without your own scale.
Luckily I have a digital scale and was able to ascertain that the bag of whole beans (correcting for the tare weight) I purchased was 115 grams. Given a price of $8.80, this is incredibly expensive coffee.

But before we evaluate it, let's consider the claims made on the bag.  First, this is organic coffee. Second, it is from Kenya. Those are the relevant claims.  Searching the website listed on the bag, rockpapercoffee.ca, reveals that these coffee beans were roasted here in Saskatchewan.

Ordinarily I'll buy about 300 grams of Organic Fair Trade Ethiopian coffee beans from McQuarrie's Tea & Coffee Merchants for about $12.  For comparison's sake, you can buy about 454 grams of Tim Horton's coffee beans for about $7.50 at supermarkets.

For my review I prepared this coffee three times over two days in order to get a real sense of whether or not I might have an even more expensive coffee habit.

Cup #1. To be sure, after adding three tablespoons of coconut milk coffee cream (no sugar... ever), I was able to determine that, in fact, the coffee tastes like an organic fair trade coffee.  This is a very good sign.  Generally speaking I really dislike vegan coffee cream options, but with this blend of coffee it actually tasted okay.  Still, it's no better than the fair trade coffee I usually get.

Cup #2: Prepared "Bulletproof" style with 15ml of MCT Oil, 2 tablespoons of unsalted grass-fed butter, blended for 30 seconds in a blender.  This method produced one of the best cups of bulletproof coffee I have ever had.  I'm not sure exactly why this particular bean produces such a great cup of bulletproof coffee.  Could it be how it was roasted? Maybe it's the quality of nutrients in the soil where this coffee was grown?

Cup #3: Prepared with three tablespoons of 18% cream.  This was a good cup of coffee, but was it worth the cost?  Well, I'll defer that question.

At any rate, I think the cost of $8.80 (that's after GST is assessed) makes this a little too rich for my blood, though I'm sure I'll buy a few more of these from time to time.  The coffee isn't bad, and it's always a good thing to support local businesses.  I love the idea of offering Kenyan coffee!

A review of Runtastic's story running

I've seen the "story running" tab in my Runtastic App, and because I didn't have any idea (or curiosity) what it was I didn't bother to use it... until now.  Since today was pretty much a recovery-type day for me (considering how much hard running I did in Vancouver last week), I figured I'd run for about 30 minutes at a relatively conservative pace.  Naturally, though, I through my plans mostly out the window and did a "fartlek" session using the Story Running feature of Runtastic.  This particular program was of the coaching variety and featured non-descript gym music you might find in Berlin.  The narrator guided me through the oddly named "fartlek" session [note: Fartlek is a Swedish creation, and according to a Google search, is defined as "a system of training for distance runners in which the terrain and pace are continually varied to eliminate boredom and enhance psychological aspects of conditioning"].  At first I had a little trouble determining when to start increasing my effort because, and maybe it's just me, the narrator was a little vague about giving the command.  I'm hesitant to criticize too much, but I will say that since my splits are being timed, it seems rather odd that the timer begins before the programs expects you to actually begin running.

The interface is similar to a normal running sessions, though the voice coach is muted by default (probably a good thing).  Overall I'm intrigued by the idea of story running, though it remains to be seen if any of the other offerings are better/worse than this.  We shall see.

Runtastic Mountain Bike and Road Bike Apps: Useful?

Okay let's talk cross training a little.  One of the toughest parts of trying to track a bike ride is knowing how many calories you're burning.  There are quite a few apps on the market, but today I'm going to talk about Runtastic's Mountain Bike and Road Bike apps, which I've used extensively over the past month.

For starters, I tested the Mountain Bike app while riding an old BRC mountain bike with studded tires, and I tested the Road Bike app on my 2016 Kona Dew (a hybrid bike) also with studded tires.

If there's an obvious difference between the apps, it's in how they count burned calories.  Clearly my hulking BRC bike requires more effort to ride than my Kona bike, but twice as much?  Therein lies my first problem... I'm using a hybrid bike, which is clearly a more laborious ride than a road bike.  So I'm going to calculate my calorie burn at about 1.5x of the Road Bike read out.  There, problem solved... I hope.

Now, let's take a look at the interface of both apps (Road Bike is in red, Mountain Bike is in Brown):

So for roughly the same route, I appear to be much faster on my hybrid bike than on my mountain bike, yet, the calorie burn on my mountain bike is more profound.  Again, let's remember, we're estimating that I burned about 325 calories (not 217).

As with Runtastic's flagship app, the "voice coach" announces a number of different statistics (pace/time etc) every kilometre (or mile), which is pretty interesting if you're into challenging yourself to go faster.  The app is also pretty accurate with elevation, distances and speeds.

Where the apps fall short, however, is with heart rate tracking via Apple Watch.  Unlike Runtastic (running) for Apple Watch, you cannot begin and end bike rides via Apple Watch.  The upshot is that you need to use a separate heart rate monitor if you want to track your heart rate.  So far the only workaround I can think of is using the Activity app that comes with Apple Watch and using it to track your run as well--doing so will give you your average heart rate.  It's then a simple matter to find your maximum heart rate using the Health app on your iPhone.  Hopefully, though, Runtastic will make its cycling apps available to Apple Watch.

The apps are useful if you're training and need to keep an eye on your kilometres.  After all, if you want to fuel properly it really does help to know how much energy you need.  Of course, you can do this all without apps as well.  Your choice.

5 things to know about Runtastic Interval Training

 

The Interval Training feature of the Runtastic App is buried in the menu to the extent that I've only used it twice.  In fact, the first time I used it there was no audio support (you need to have voice coach activated, or else hold your phone in your hand in order to know when intervals are beginning and ending).  At any rate, last Thursday I did 40 minutes of interval training (albeit, half of that was warming up and cooling down).

Here's what you need to know:

1. The audio coach will announce each interval for you, and in doing so provide a heads up before the interval is to begin and before it is to end.  It's really hard to screw up.
2. You can design your own interval sessions or use one of the incumbent sessions
3. Forget Apple Watch.  If you're using Apple Watch to monitor your heart rate, you need to use Apple Watch in order to begin a Runtastic session.  Alas you cannot (as of now) start an interval session using Apple Watch.  As a result, you cannot have heart rate data recorded by Runtastic during interval sessions--unless, of course, you use a separate bluetooth heart rate monitor.
4. You can perform intervals by either time or pace.  In my case, I alternated between 1 minute of nearly all-out sprinting and 1 minute of recovery "shuffling".  I probably covered about 220-250 metres during each intensive run--roughly a 4 minute per kilometre pace.
5. Gear. This may seem like a no brainer, but it's probably a good idea to wear "performance" shoes as well as calf compression sleeves if you're new to interval training. I found a bit of soreness in my soleus muscle post-run--in fact, that soreness lingered for two days. 

MyFitnessPal versus Cronometer

Cronometer and MyFitnessPal are apps for tracking food consumption and exercise.  Both require you to honestly enter the foods you eat to be of any use.
At any rate, I've been using MyFitnessPal since around 2011.  As crazy as it seems, I've logged probably 70 to 80% of the meals I've had since I began using the app.  As a tool for general weight loss, MyFitnessPal has been an adequate and occasionally interesting tool since it brands itself as a sort of Facebook meets food diary app.  Unlike Facebook activities, eating habits aren't likely to be offered as readily for public consumption, and that's where MyFitnessPal probably goes wrong.  For example, of the half dozen or so people I've friended on MyFitnessPal, none regularly update their profiles... I'm sure there are plenty of people who participate more faithfully than the people I know... but still.
Cronometer isn't interested in the social aspect of weight loss.  Rather Cronometer is essentially a site that let's you track your nutrient and caloric intake to a fairly myopic level.  You can, if you like, monitor your intake of every single different amino acid.  That's pretty nice.

So let's go through this category by category:

Cronometer vs MyFitnessPal 

Social Component
Winner: MyFitnessPal

• You can track your friends' weight loss progress while posting your own.  
• Might be interesting to see more emphasis on self promoting good health, as opposed just weight loss.  

Appearance
Winner: MyFitnessPal

• It's really not close. 

Quality of Food Database 
Winner: Cronometer

• What Cronometer lacks in elegance and aesthetic is more than made up for in utility.  Granted the $2.99 app isn't terribly useful [at least, as compared to the free app from MyFitnessPal], but it is okay on the run.  Both websites, though, are free to use.
• What I'm concerned with when I'm logging the food I eat are things like poly and mono unsaturated fats [including omegas].  Even supposedly "verified" foods in the MyFitnessPal database often lack that basic level of information; in some cases the listed foods are egregiously incorrect.    As it is now, MyFitnessPal does not even provide fields for vitamins like B6 and B12, nor does it break down protein into its constituent amino acids. This may be a fairly flimsy complaint to make, given that most people really don't care to the degree that fitness fanatics do.
• I find that I have to add certain foods myself using Cronometer.  I'm referring to certain processed foods that haven't even made it into their database just yet. More general items, like a Jamaican meat patty cannot even be added through a general search using Cronometer.  This is not a problem with MyFitnessPal.
• The food database for MyFitnessPal is, it seems, user generated, which is both good and bad. It's good because it allows us to have a wikipedia type of food database... but it's bad because the amount of oversight is zero, and that error rate appears to be fairly significant.  This is something to consider if you have more than a passing interest in logging your meals in a diary. 

As you can see in the images below, Cronometer is pretty in depth.

Overall winner: Cronometer
MyFitnessPal would win hands down if it provided the sort of detail that Cronometer does.  Given that UnderArmour has purchased MyFitnessPal I'm expecting a great deal of improvement.  But for now Cronometer provides such a breadth of detail that I prefer it.