Week 178 Update

It was 07:15 when I finally woke up. When I stepped up on Mr. Scale he said, "185.0 pounds!"

This week the local residents kept a nervous eye pointed towards Mount St. Helens, but nothing much happened there. A few steam releases, mixed with a little ash, and an increase in the height of the lava dome in the crater added up to little more than a curiosity. Monitoring one of the online seismographs had shown that some earthquake activity has continued in the mountain, but the larger quakes had subsided for now. The experts are left asking themselves whether the ascending lava will stop where it is, push its way to the top and flow like a river from the crater like a relatively passive Hawaiian volcano, or perhaps explode into the sky like it did in 1980. Sooner or later all three of those expressions of magma motion will no doubt be presented at St. Helens, since it is the most active of the Cascade volcanoes. It has done all three before, and as long as magma continues to push upwards, it will express itself in one of those ways. For now, we wait and watch.

This week I only averaged 37.21 points per day. That is a drop of over 7 points per day from last week. Even so, my average weight went up from 185.00 to 185.93, nearly an increase of a whole pound. The increase was due to Aleve's high sodium content, and the associated water retention. By pulling in my points a bit, I was able to hold my weight in the target zone for every day except one: on Thursday my weight jumped up 3 pounds—but it fell back just as far the next day.

I ate more points on each of the weekend days this week, but my total points for any single day was never too high. Saturday was 42.0 and Sunday was 48.0 (we tried out a new Mexican restaurant that day that had opened up around the corner from where we live), but the remainder of the week I kept my points in the 30s somewhere. I stayed home from work Thursday because I was feeling ill, and I only ate 30.0 points on that day. Dotti had made my normal lunch for that day, and I ended up nursing it along all afternoon, and didn't finish it until dinnertime. So, I didn't need another meal then.

This week I drank at least 6 cups of water each day. I ended up averaging 69.71 ounces (8.7 cups) per day. That pushed me over the top of my minimum target range for water of 6 to 8 cups per day.

Once again I did well on my walking. By week's end I had walked enough to move my yearly total up to 865.1 miles, leaving me 334.9 miles short of my goal of 1,200, with 84 days still to go. I had worked the number of miles per day that I have to average to hit my goal back down to less than 4. I have averaged 21.5 miles per week for the entire year of 2004. For the remainder of the year I need to average 27.9 miles per week. The latter number has fallen a lot since the week of August 20th when I was far enough behind to need to average 31.57 for all the remaining weeks of the year.

I was ill this week. I only walked 3 miles on Wednesday, and I did no walking at all on Thursday. Even so, I was able to get in 33.66 miles for the week, exceeded my minimum target (28.35 miles) to move me to my 1,200 miles by December 31.

The weather this week has been really nice for walking. The temperature has been nice and cool, usually in the 50s, and I have only had to walk in the rain a couple of times all week long. Even on days where it was raining on my drive into work and on the way home, it has usually dried up for the actual times that I was walking. Friday, after my lunchtime walk, it cut loose with a tremendous downpour while I was sitting in my car eating my lunch after my walk, where I had remained completely dry. It did rain Friday night for my walk, but I was wearing my raincoat and it was not a problem.

If you divide the 1,200 miles up evenly between all the days of the year, I should have reached the number of miles that I have walked so far on day 253, or September 20. It is October 9th, and so I am only 19 days behind schedule. I continue to work that number down, and I hope that it will not be too much longer before I will be able to get ahead of schedule, and be able to slow down into the normal walking routine that I had envisioned: walking a couple of miles during the workday, plus 3 miles in the evening with Dotti, for 5 days a week, with weekends off if desired.

One of the things that I like about walking is that it brings me outside and in contact with nature more than I used to be. I continue to be amazed by the number of squirrels that are running hither and yon during my walks. I seldom complete a walk without seeing at least one or two running across the road or up a tree. Many of them of are getting quite close before scampering away. I have watched the moon go through its cycles night after night, and day after day, waxing and waning, rising and setting and different times, and that has been fun as well. The temperature and the moisture content of the air, and the strength of the wind become important when you are walking in out in the open. Even when walking on the city streets, as we do in the evening, nature reaches out and embraces us far more than it does when we are in our house or our car. Walking in the park during lunch brings nature even closer, as I see quite a variety of flora and fauna that I would be missing otherwise.

My walking times vary quite a bit. However, when I do walk a mile in less than 14 minutes, I don't feel like I am pushing it as hard as used to in order to get that pace going. On Wednesday I wasn't feeling well, and still I walked at a 4.25 mph pace at lunch for a mile and a half. Friday, as I was trying to get back on track from being off ill, I held my pace down to around 15 minutes a mile. But I feel like I am just taking a leisurely stroll at 4 mph.

My body is definitely getting used to walking regularly. I do sometimes wrap my knees when walking at home, but most of the time I don't need to. I never wrap them at work any longer. Considering the number of miles that I am walking these days (over 125 miles during the last 3 weeks) I have been very happy with how well my knees have been holding up!

3 years, 151 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3" 239.5/185.0/180±2/BMI:23.12/WK-178
GRAPHS: Weight Loss/Year 1 Maint./Year 2 Maint./Year 3 Maint./Miles Walked
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