Image from Junonia.com

Women’s plus-size activewear retailer Junonia is offering a 10-percent-off coupon to anyone who participates in active events.

When you register for any kind of run, walk, or bike event, forward your confirmation email to Junonia and you’ll receive the coupon as part of the company’s new “It Pays to Play” program.

If you’ve already signed up for the Pelotonia charity bike tour to benefit cancer research at Ohio State, then you’re eligible for the coupon! Why not get a new outfit and look good on the road August 28-30? (The outfit shown in this image is casual, but Junonia offers performance bike wear as well. I can testify that Junonia clothing is of high quality, though a bit expensive — that’s where the coupon comes in handy.)

Details of the program and a list of sample events are here.

As of today, Pelotonia is not on the list, but Junonia Marketing Associate Ira Brooker tells me that it will be added to the page with the next site update. Meanwhile, you can forward your Pelotonia confirmation email at any time to get your coupon.

And here are some other upcoming athletic events for central Ohio:

The Columbus Marathon

The Start! 2009 Central Ohio Heart Walk

The American Diabetes Association Step Out: Walk to Fight Diabetes

I love water aerobics, but I’m bothered by how quickly my bathing suits wear out. The colors fade, the fabric thins. The suit I’ve used three times a week since January has gone from hot pink/black to bubblegum/gray. And there’s a spot in the back where the fabric looks like it’s started to disintegrate.

My current suit -- super-cute, but, sadly, about to be replaced.

So what’s going on? I think we all know that chlorine fades clothes — that’s how bleach works, right? But what exactly is happening chemically, and how can I make my suits last longer?

For these questions, I turned to Malcolm Chisholm, Distinguished Professor of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and chair of the Department of Chemistry. He explains it this way:

Chlorinated water produces hydrochloric acid, and hypochlorous acid. The latter is an oxidizing agent found in common bleach. If you spill beach on your clothes, you will soon have permanent damage and most likely holes where the bleach landed. In the washing machine, the bleach is added to dilution which is somewhat like the swimming pool. Now, as to your swim suit, if you wash it out thoroughly with cold water it should last a long, long time. I certainly have a swim suit that is at least ten years old.

A commercially available chlorine neutralizer

Wow! I wish I could get a suit to last ten years! At first, I tried to preserve my current suit with a chlorine neutralizer. This was a long and tedious procedure. I brought a large plastic container to RPAC, and soaked my suit in it with the neutralizer while I showered after class. Then I agitated it in the container like ye olde tyme wash basin, and rinsed it multiple times with cold water. This actually seemed to work — my suit looked like new — but it was inconvenient. So one day I gave up, and just rinsed my suit in cold water. That’s when the fading started. Maybe I just didn’t rinse it thoroughly enough.

So why does the fabric disintegrate, I wondered? Bathing suits are typically made of synthetic polymers such as nylon and lycra, which are known for their strength and elasticity. Chisholm had this to say:

If you want a more chemical answer, then the bleach breaks down the polymers so that the fabric falls apart slowly as dust particles.

Ah-ha! So that explains it. I have a tip about a company that guarantees its suits for a year with proper care. I’m going to check it out.

My husband just gave me an early birthday present: a heart rate monitor and accessories so that I can accurately measure the intensity of my workouts and the calories I’m burning.

I am often confused by the way different exercise machines present their data. Every machine, it seems, has a different way of telling me how much work I am doing. What on Earth, I have always wondered, is a “Met”? And different machines seem to give wildly different measures of the calories I’m burning for the same activity. Could one brand of elliptical machine really make me burn 100 more calories than another?

When Matthew Garver, a doctoral student in health and exercise science, gave me my exercise prescription, he explained some of the more confusing elements. He said, for instance, that Mets are a measure of metabolic rate, or energy expenditure. My VO2max rating of 24.5 could be expressed as 7 Mets.

He suggested that a good way to know whether I was exercising at the optimum rate was to look not to Mets or even calories, but to the number of watts I was generating. Watts are a measure of power, in the amount of energy per second that I expend while I’m on the machine. Then I can check my heart rate (on the machines that offer this option) to gauge how hard my body is working to generate that amount of power.

He suggested that I aim for 40 watts. Based on my resting heart rate and peak heart rate during my fitness test, I know that my heart rate should vary between 138 (warming up) and 167 (working hard) if I want to stay in the right “zone” for burning calories. About.com has great instructions on how to calculate your own cardio zone.

Now, I may write about mathematical sciences for a living, but I’ve reached my limit on what I want to calculate on my own. Hence the heart rate monitor. It will not only give me more accurate data than an exercise machine (because it is directly measuring my heart rate the entire time I’m working out), it will let me upload the data to my computer for analysis. At that point, I’m happy to let the computer do all the work!

I’ll try these out for a while, and will post a product review.

The other day after a swim, I ducked into the RPAC sauna… a girl who had been lounging there squinted at my new swim shoes. I figured she was just jealous, because these shoes are absolutely adorable. Only then did I read the sign on the door: shoes prohibited. Her flip-flops were sitting demurely outside.

Adorable, no?

Aghast, I scanned the tile floor in vain for any visible sign of athletes’ foot fungus. Could it really be safe to walk barefoot here? I walked barefoot in a gym once. Once.

Yet all around me at RPAC, people were barefoot. Exiting the locker rooms, crossing the hallway, emerging from the pool. All oblivious to the itchy danger that might lurk beneath them.

My mind raced. Could the RPAC floor be made from magic fungus-resistant tile? Could these people have acquired some kind of fungal immunity? Could I stop asking these questions and just take off my shoes already?

No, I couldn’t. I left them on.

No one arrested me.

I’m a little flummoxed about the shoe policy. I can see why RPAC wouldn’t allow street shoes in the saunas — it’s a cleanliness issue. But why not allow shower shoes or swim shoes? Does anybody know? Send me an email, or leave a comment below. And let me know whether you’ve walked barefoot in RPAC and emerged fungus free.