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I have a new goal before winter: Ride my bike to work.

My boyfriend and I have fitness bikes that we ride around back roads near our house. We usually ride between six to eight miles, three to five times a week. We ride out to a certain point in the country, and then we ride home. He is much faster than me because he bikes more than I do. I am a jogger, so on days when I jog, he rides. So he is riding twice as much as I am. This is noticeable when I am panting and sweating and he looks like he’s just on an afternoon cruise.

I just mapped out the route I would have to take to work on MapMyRide.com, and it surprises me to see it will only be about 8 miles. That means this is very doable! However, I will be doing this in the morning when I am grumpy and groggy, and I will have to plan out how long this will take me.

The only major problem is going to be traffic. At one point, I will have to ride on a VERY busy road to get to the road my work is on. I looked up some bike safety tips to help me with this stretch of riding.

• Of course, always wear a helmet. I’ve got my spiffy blue one, so that’s not a problem.
• Wear bright clothing so drivers can see you.
• Obey the rules of the road. I plan on riding along the right side the entire trip, so that should be fine.
• Look both ways. Most accidents happen at intersections or driveways. I’ll be very careful about this, especially when I get to the intersection that connects to the busy road.

I really like BicycleSafe.com. It has a whole article about “How to Not Get Hit By Cars,” complete with diagrams showing many situations of bikers and cars and how to avoid an accident.

How to avoid the Right-Cross accident.

For now, I will have to keep riding to make sure I’m up for the eight miles, and I will have to start waking up earlier to prepare. I’ll keep you informed on how everything is going and let you know when the planned date is!

If you have any biking tips, I’d love to hear them.

I’m usually a good sleeper: Go lie in bed around 10:30 p.m. and read until 11 p.m., then lights off and I’m off to sleep. I wake up around 7 a.m., so I definitely get my seven recommended hours of sleep every night.

The last few weeks, though, I’ve been either having problems falling asleep or waking up several times during the night. I wanted to find out what could be causing this and see what I can do to get my sleep pattern back to normal. There are too many risks from not getting enough sleep, including impaired mood and memory, dampened immune system and an increased risk of accidents! Yikes.

1. The thing I have come across most is that adults need between 7-8 hours of sleep. Older adults might even need more – or a nap during the day – if they continually wake up groggy or exhausted.
2. Another thing is bed size – apparently size does matter! It should be large enough that you can stretch and turn (even with a bedmate).
3. As far as atmosphere goes, the room you sleep in should have low noise and be dark at night. Even computer screens and TV screens can trick your body from their false light! Sleep masks or heavy shades can keep all light distraction down.
   

   Sleep Masks help block light so your body knows it's time for sleep.

4. Room temperature is a big one. Helpguide.org reports most people sleep best in slightly cooler temps.
5. Do not eat or drink large amount of anything right before bed! This can wake you up in the night because you’ll have to use the restroom.
6. Avoid nicotine, caffeine and alcohol in the evenings. This is hard for me because I love to have a latte after work but I have definitely noticed that if I wait too late, until 7 p.m. or after, I have problems falling asleep at my regular time.
7. Exercise daily, but not too close to bedtime. All that adrenaline pumping can keep you up for hours!
8. Another big one: Avoid watching TV in bed. The bedroom should only be used for sleep and sex, to strengthen the association between bed and sleep.

Here are some things you can do to prepare for sleep, to get both your mind and body ready to drift off and relax:

• Reading
• Listening to soft music or books on tape
• Light snack, hot tea or warm milk
• Knitting, puzzles, or other hobbies

Help.org has much more information, from handling stress and anxiety that keeps you up at night to optimizing your sleep schedule and improving your diet and exercising. The National Sleep Foundation also has great tips on healthy sleeping.

Looks like I’ll be turning down the thermostat, turning off the TV, and avoiding my late-day lattes. Hopefully that will help! If not, I can always use Kavinace.

Happy sleeping! Share any sleep tips you have with us. We’d love to hear them.

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Tweaking tongue receptors could encourage people to consume more of the vital nutrient.

It may be time to add calcium to the types of tastes — sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory — that can be detected by humans, according to U.S. researchers.

They found that a taste for calcium exists in mice. Since mice and humans share many of the same genes, the finding suggests that people may also be able to taste calcium. If that’s true, it could have a number of implications.

“People don’t consume as much calcium as nutritionists would like, and one reason for this is that foods high in calcium don’t taste good to many people. Tweaking its taste could encourage a calcium-deficient population to consume more of this key nutrient,” Michael G. Tordoff, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, said in an American Chemical Society news release.

“By understanding how calcium is detected in the mouth, we can either make it easier to consume by reducing its bad taste or even make pharmacological agents that make it taste better,” Tordoff said.

He and his colleagues identified two receptors on the tongues of mice that are involved in tasting calcium. One is a calcium-sensing receptor called CaSR that has been found in the parathyroid gland, kidney, brain and gastrointestinal tract.

“We didn’t know it was on the tongue before,” Tordoff said.

The other receptor is T1R3, which plays a role in sweet taste. The discovery that T1R3 also plays a role in tasting calcium was “very unexpected.”

Tordoff and his team were expected to presented the research Wednesday at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting, in Philadelphia.

More information

The HealthDesigns Library has more info on calcium

It may, in fact, be possible to outrun death — and even the creeping ravages of time — at least for a while.Research spanning two decades has found that older runners live longer and suffer fewer disabilities than healthy non-runners.

And the findings probably apply to a variety of aerobic exercises, including walking, said the study authors, from Stanford University School of Medicine, whose findings are published in the Aug. 11 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“This is telling you that being a runner, being active is going to reduce your disability, and it’s going to increase your survival,” said Marcia Ory, professor of social and behavioral health at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health in College Station. “Late in life, you still see the benefit of vigorous activity.”

In 1980, the study’s lead author, Dr. James Fries, emeritus professor of medicine at Stanford, wrote a landmark paper outlining his “compression of morbidity” hypothesis. The theory held that regular exercise would compress, or reduce, the amount of time near the end of life when a person was disabled or unable to carry out the activities of daily living, such as walking, dressing and getting out of a chair.

“Illness would be compressed between later age of onset and age of death, and that paradigm was controversial, because it went against conventional wisdom and had no proof,” Fries explained.

At the time, many experts believed that vigorous exercise would actually harm older individuals. And running, in particular, would result in an epidemic of joint and bone injuries.

But this new study proves otherwise.

Two hundred and eighty-four runners and 156 healthy “controls,” or non-runners, in California completed annual questionnaires over a 21-year period. The participants were 50 years old or over at the beginning of the study and ran an average of about four hours a week. By the end of the study period, the participants were in their 70s or 80s or older and ran about 76 minutes a week.

At 19 years, just 15 percent of the runners had died, compared with 34 percent of the non-runners.

Also, said Fries, who is almost 70, runs 20 miles a week and plays tennis, “Running delayed the onset of disability by an average of 16 years, and that is largely a conservative number, because the control group was pretty darn healthy.”

And the slew of predicted orthopedic injuries never materialized.

Surprisingly, the health gap between runners and non-runners only increased with time. “I always thought that the two curves would start to parallel each other and that eventually aging would overpower exercise,” Fries said. “I think that will happen, but we can’t find even a little twitch toward that gap narrowing in the present time.”

Which is not to say that running is the only activity that’s good for you.

“Vigorous activity has a really dramatic impact, but we can’t ignore that there are also helpful benefits to people who are active at all levels, meaning those people who are just out walking” said Ory. “It’s so important to be physically active your whole life, not just in your 20s or 40s, but forever.”

Added Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City: “Exercise is like the most potent drug. Exercise is by far the best thing you can do.”

More information

The HealthDesigns Library has more info on healthy aging