Week 193 Update

Although we missed out on our trip to the coast last weekend, we did the best we could to have a weekend “away.” Friday night I turned on our “Ocean Surf” CD in a back room of the house, loud enough to simulate being in our room at the coast, while we watched “The Village.” The movie was an interesting study on “getting away from it all,” but I was left wondering if that was really the best solution that an extremely wealthy guy could come up with? But when a movie leaves you thinking, at least it has served a purpose. And of course the time spent with my best friend was priceless!!!

Saturday I weighed-in at 185.0 pounds. We had an interesting day, in that we had some nasty weather, in the form of freezing rain. The high for the day was right at 32°, and the rain was freezing in odd patterns here and there. Sidewalks were treacherous, while parts of the asphalted areas of parking lots were merely wet. The cold was being supplied from the Columbia Gorge, whose mouth lies to the east of us. So the farther east we went the more freezing we saw. We braved the elements, taking the opportunity to test out our new studded snow tires. We sure couldn’t have timed it better getting studded snow tires on our car! Dotti kept the car on Thursday and had them put on, with no idea that this storm was coming at that time.

We stopped at Safeway, then had lunch at Sweet Tomatoes and then visited Wall Mart and Target. Target is some distance to the east of Wall Mart, and its parking lot was far icier than Wall Mart's was. Across the Columbia River they had a much worse time of it. The radio was carrying stories of the problems that they were having, including the fact that traffic on the I-5 bridge across the Willamette was almost completely stopped due to the weather. We had our little outing and then went back to our warm house, where after our exercise time, we watched an old 1950s movie, with some nice OP popcorn.

Dotti and I both used the treadmill on Saturday. There was no way that we were going to go walking outside on that ice. She did her walk first, and then I ended up trying a “Half-Larch Mountain” hike, where I walked 4.0 miles at 10% incline (giving me an equivalent effort of climbing and elevation change of +2112 feet), and then I walked another 3.0 miles at 0% incline. Technically, the shortest Larch Mountain Trail is 6.8 miles long, from the Multnomah Falls parking lot, to the top of the mountain, 4059 feet up. So, half of the entire hike would be 6.8 miles in length, with an elevation increase of 2029.5 feet. I like round numbers when I can get them, so 4 miles and 3 miles worked out well for me, even though they were a bit more than I needed to do to match the intended hike.

I tried something that I have never done before, I used Dotti’s TV that she has set up for the treadmill. It has a built-in DVD player and I was planning on doing an extended walk, with incline. I knew that was going to take some time. So, I popped in a movie (Harry Potter I) and started walking. My first problem hit just past 0.40 miles into the walk. Because the television was on, I had the room fairly dark.

I had the window open this time, because I remembered how hot it got last time. Even so, I needed to turn on the fan. I pushed what I thought was the fan button on the treadmill, but all at once the treadmill started slowing down drastically. I thought that I must have hit the “cool down” button by mistake. (It turned out that it was only the 1 MPH button, and it would have been very easy to fix that mistake if I had known.) I didn’t know of any easy way to change out of the cool down mode, back into normal walking mode.

Fortunately, I had started the stopwatch on my wristwatch, and was tracking my walking time with that. I just noted the mileage reading on the odometer, and pulled the key on the treadmill, shutting it down completely and then started right back up again. Soon I was walking merrily along.

I reached the 4-mile point, lowered the incline back down to 0%, and then hit my next problem at 5 miles. All at once the treadmill just shut down all on its own. I had hit the 2-hour point and it has this “feature” (I call it a bug) where it assumes you are finished in 2 hours whether or not you really are. (There are times when I am very upset with how our society takes control out of our hands of what we are doing to “protect us” from ourselves. There is a freedom factor involved that is being eroded away by this process. This is a case in point.) I went into a mad scramble to try and collect the data as to where I was at on the odometer, especially with the 0.4-mile offset I had to factor in, and then to reset the treadmill and get it going again. (I had to pull the key again which resets everything, and unfortunately clears the screen of all data.)

Soon, I was walking again, but I turned the television off for the rest of the walk, and was juggling numbers around in my head: 1:35:44 ended the 4.0 miles at 10%, 2:16:22 was the 6.8 mile mark, and then 2:19:02 was for 7.0 miles. The stopwatch was fortunately running outside of the treadmill’s influence, and I was able to keep an accurate tally on the time passing.

I learned from this experience that I must break my walks up into segments that are no longer than 2 hours. For instance, it would have been good if I had written down my time and distance at the end of 4 miles at 10% incline, and then reset the treadmill to do the final 3 miles. In that vein, I also learned that I needed to have a pen and paper handy when I am walking. (I later found that Dotti actually had one of each there within reach, but I had placed the DVD case on top of them and they were out of view.) I also need to have a light on, so I can see the buttons on the treadmill control panel. Lastly, I think that my original view on watching television during my walk was correct.

While I felt like I had gotten a good workout, I didn’t feel like I had overdone it. I was happy about that. I haven’t been doing a lot of hill climbing in my walking of late, and I wasn’t sure how I would react to the incline. I slowed down naturally, but I was okay. I hope to tackle the entire Larch Mountain hike one of these times.

After Sweet Tomatoes and the delicious dinner Dotti cooked for us, a few other things to eat, I finished the day having eaten 60.5 points.

Sunday I was up to 186.0 pounds. The temperature was sitting at 28°, and all of the rain that had been falling on Saturday was now frozen, covering everything outside. I decided to test our new tires again, this time on nothing but ice. I was impressed. The tires slid some, but they did corner and they did stop me much quicker than our original radials did.

I worked on the computer for a few hours, and then I finished the first Harry Potter movie, that I had started watching while on the treadmill the day before. I then continued on to the second one. (I didn't go on to watch the third one. I was really disappointed with the new director that they got for HP III. The movie was OK, but IMHO it didn't capture the feel of the books the way the first two did.)

By the time I finished, it was time for my walk. The ice was gone by this time, and I did my 3.05-mile loop in the 36° "balmy" air, finishing up around 6:15 pm. I did walk a bit slower than usual (15:17 per mile), but I was feeling a bit tired still from the incline work on the treadmill on Saturday.

I ended up eating 53.0 points for the day.

Monday my weight jumped up to 188.0 pounds. Since I had gone through much of last week fighting my weight back down from the cheesecake fiasco, I was thinking, "Here I go again." Admittedly, my total points for the weekend (113.5—56.75 per day) were lower than the previous weekend (162.5—81.25 per day), and really were not all that far out of bounds, seeing my weight jump two pounds, and popping right out of my target zone to boot, did not set well with me. On Sunday I had snacked a lot all day, and my food choices were not the best. I had eaten a very nice steak dinner that Dotti prepared for lunch, and there was some salt that I ate during the meal.

Anyway, I decided I was not finished with the battle that I had been fighting the preceding week, and I held my points to 38.5 for the day.

The drive in to work was a bit tricky. I left home early, as I have done of late. The temperature at home was several degrees above freezing, but the Columbia Gorge was still blowing a stream of cold air down a narrow corridor along the route of the Columbia River. The Glenn Jackson Bridge, which crosses the river carrying I-205 with it, progressively had colder and colder air surrounding it as I headed south. It finally fell below freezing right at the southern end. On the northbound side of the freeway there were police lights flashing and traffic was snarled to a halt. (I imagine climbing on the ice was found to be worse than sliding down through it as was happening on the southbound side, because the number of cars headed south at that time of day is far greater, and while I had to slow down a lot—mostly from the rubberneckers—we didn't come to a stop, even with the icy strip of freeway.)

Progressing on, I found that traffic on I-84 was moving slowly, and towards the western end, there was quite a logjam. The temperature was 36°, so this had nothing to do with freezing, but there was an accident on the northbound off ramp to I-5, backing all the lanes up, and adding a lot of time to my commute. By the time I arrived at work I only had time to do a 2.4-mile walk.

Just before lunch, after an otherwise quiet morning, time became unexpected available on one of our machines to some work on it. It needed an auxiliary hard drive installed, with data to be transferred to it from a backup tape. The hardware installation went smoothly, but the software part did not. When the computer was booted up it detected the hard drive okay, but the UNIX script that was supposed to do the software transfer continually errored out. I had to get in touch with the factory and get a procedure for manually doing the steps. These backup tape systems are very slow, and just getting a listing of what is on the tape can take an hour or more. Then copying the data file over to the main hard drive, and then extracting the data and installing it on the auxiliary drive took up most of the afternoon. I only took a quick break for lunch and did not take a walk at all, because I wanted to get the machine back up and running.

On my drive home, I-5 was backed up when I got to the street I take to get to the on-ramp. I just kept right on going past that mess, and took a back road to the airport and jumped on I-205. As it turned out, that was a good choice, because there were no abnormal back ups the rest of the way.

Since we got the treadmill, Dotti has been doing her walking there. (And she has been doing it much more regularly too!) So, I have not been very motivated to walk at home in the evenings. I try and get my walking done in the early morning and at lunch, leaving the evenings free. Also, after my long drive home, I don't have all that long anyway before it is time for bed, and taking an hour out to walk leaves very little time for me. So, I didn't walk in the evenings much this week.

Tuesday I weighed 187.0 pounds, which was a bit better. I still held my points down to 38.5 once more to get things back where they belonged.

The temperature had jumped up faster than the scale did on Monday. The thermometer said 55° when I left home! It was raining water, and gravel during the drive. In Portland they don't salt the roads. Instead they dump gravel everywhere, for which the windshield replacement companies are eternally grateful. Even in the summertime you had better not ride behind a large truck if you don't want your windshield to be pummeled with rocks.

A brief aside, during my first week here in 1995, I was driving a rent-a-car that my company had supplied until my company car was available, and I noticed it had a cracked windshield before I got it. My first day on the road with it, and I got hit with a rock that put a matching ding in it just a couple of inches away from the first one. It took me a bit to learn that in Portland you do not ride behind vehicles with large tires, especially semis, because you will crack your windshield.

Finally I settled into a relatively rock free zone where I could safely make my way into work, but every time a car passed me I got hit with a few pieces of rock. I could tell I was being assaulted, because I could hear it clearly over the whine that my studded snow tires were making.

I had gotten out the door nice and early in the morning because I wanted to make up for the small number of miles I had walked the day before. I ended up being able to walk 4.17 miles before work. The temperature there was 57°. Many summer mornings start out cooler than that! It was raining, so I had to wear my raincoat, but it was too warm. I felt pretty overheated by the end of the walk.

For the rest of the day, my walking came in pieces far more than normal. Just before lunch (this was a pattern that was to continue through the week) on an otherwise quiet morning, I got a request to deliver some parts to another customer site. On Wednesday, the new parts that had been ordered to replace the ones that I had delivered on Tuesday needed to be returned, once again just before lunch. So, I turned the lemons into lemonade.

In both cases, since time (it happened right at lunchtime for both events) and timing (I could accomplish the task faster than needed by walking) allowed it, I used the opportunity to get my walk in and accomplish my task at the same time. The second site is right along my normal walking route for both my 2.4-mile and my 3.l7-mile loops. Since the parts were small, I just put them into my pocket to carry them, and did a 10-minute walk to the site to deliver/pickup the parts, and then continued on around the loop to finish. The first segment was 0.75 mile, and the second part was 2.69 miles, giving me a total walk of 3.44 miles, only adding 0.27 to my normal 3.17-mile loop each day.

On Tuesday, it was 60° when I walked at lunch. That is really warm for this time of year. I wore my raincoat but there was no rain, and I could have gone without it, if I didn't need the pockets.

In the evening it was still 60°, and Dotti and I walked over to Red Robin for dinner and then back again. Red Robin is located along the route of our normal 3.05-mile route, just across a main thoroughfare. So, we walked the first leg of the loop, and reached Red Robin in 1.9 miles, and on the walk home we walked another 1.30 miles, giving us a total of 3.20 miles. Dotti has a Fajita salad that she orders there that is lower in points than eating at Sweet Tomatoes is for us. So, I decided to try it out. I am not terribly fond of chicken and so didn't eat that part, but the rest was a great meal all unto itself. I was stuffed when I had finished, and had only consumed 4 points. That is a lot better than I usually do at Red Robin.

On the walk home, it felt cooler, probably because we had consumed some cold water and tea/soda, and because we were oriented in such a way to catch the breeze that had sprung up. I was actually glad to have my raincoat on for that part of the walk.

Wednesday I was back down to 185.0 pounds. That was more like it.

Dotti, who has taken Wednesday as her weigh-in day, was down another 2.0 pounds this week! That is 4.5 pounds in two weeks! I am personally even more excited in seeing how she is right back on track running the program. She has been eating right everyday, keeping her points inside her target range. She has been exercising religiously, right when she has set her goal to be exercising. And naturally, as a result, she is getting a response on the scale. The past year, I have seen her start out for a few days where she was almost on track, only to falter, but this is the first time I have seen her hitting on all cylinders since she quit smoking. If she just keeps doing what she is doing right now, she will be at goal again sometime this year!

Not only that, it looks like we may be able to get the Coon Family Hiking Club going again this year, because she is doing so well on her walking! It has been a very hard 3 years for her, especially last year, and it is very, very nice seeing her back on track again. That look of confidence, and determination—stolen by the smoking cessation, knee surgery, rheumatoid arthritis, and various other problems that have arisen—is so nice to see again. Dotti's back! I am so happy for her!!!

I got to work early again and was able to do a 3.17-mile walk. I called my mother up on the phone during the drive in, to wish her a happy birthday. We ended up talking through half of my drive in to work, and through my entire walk. I was amazed when the walk was finished already. It went by so quickly. I asked her if she enjoyed taking another 3-mile walk with me. It was 52° during the walk and it felt very comfortable, with no rain.

At lunch I had to pick up the aforementioned parts. The temperature was at 55°, which was a lot better than 60° had been, but I still took the raincoat off about halfway into the walk, and I carried it over my shoulder. It was a great day for walking.

There was nothing exciting on my drive home, and that was nice. For dinner I had a lot of volume for 16.5 points. Butter beans (one of my favorite foods), brown rice (another food I very much like) and tamales (yum!) were the heart of the meal, and I was stuffed when I was finished. I ended the day eating 51.0 points. That was a bit higher than the last couple of days, but it was not too high. I figured that I was safe there.

Thursday I weighed 185.0 pounds again. I got to work in time to do a 3.17-mile walk, and if it had been cooler (it was 49°), I might have done 4.17 miles.

It was a quiet day at work, and at lunch I did another 3.17-mile walk. The temperature was in the low 50s and there was a breeze. I even wore my cap and gloves.

The drive home was once again easy. Dotti and I drove over to Red Robin and had that salad again. I finished the day with only 35.0 points.

Friday I weighed 183.0 pounds. I think the cheesecake had finally left my system. I got to work early enough to do a 3.17-mile walk. It was very foggy along nearly the entire route of my drive in. Surprisingly, Portland seems to be able to drive in fog very well. I very seldom see traffic slowed down much by fog, which it gets far less often than rain. Rain causes problems all the time with the traffic. Go figure...

It was a beautiful, and a little bit eerie atmosphere to walk in. The sun was still down, and the streetlights burning through the fog had an interesting glow about them. Some of the fog misted on my coat sleeves and my knit cap was slightly damp at the end of the loop, but overall it was a really great time to walk.

At lunch I was starving. I knew that I had already gotten in over 39 miles for the week, and my goal was only 25. I saw that my total miles for the month was just over 98, and I was very tempted to push that over 100, but I felt like I needed food. I ate my lunch, and I was still hungry. I zipped over to McDonalds and grabbed an Oreo Mc Flurry. (It had been quite some time since I had a McFlurry. I was surprised to find that they had stopped carrying the Butterfinger McFlurry, which is what I ordered at first, but the lady on the microphone informed me that they only had the Oreo or the M&M versions.) This was one of those days when I just felt like I had not eaten enough, and when that happens I have to get something into my system. Since I was down on the scale in the morning, I got something with some calories into me to set things back on an even keel.

When I got home, after a very nice drive home for a Friday evening, Dotti was on the treadmill. So, I decided to take my 3.05 mile walk and push my total miles over 100 for the month. It was 52°, and I took a nice leisurely 4.06 mph pace. When I got back, Dotti was fixing our dinner. It included some salt on the baked fries, and I had sauerkraut, which normally I would shun on the day before weigh-in, but I was confident that things would be okay. When I went to bed I had eaten 65.5 points for the day, but I only weighed 187.0 on the scale. I knew that I would not be over today, even if I just stayed the same over night, and I never do that.

I have my spread sheet set up to tell me how I am doing on my walking. It tells me that, as of yesterday night, I had 344 days left in the year. I need to average 3.48 miles-per-day for the rest of the year to reach 1300 miles. I have averaged 4.82 miles-per-day so far this year. If I continued at that pace, I would reach 1759.8 miles by year's end. As it is, I have walked 101.3 miles, and have 1198.8 miles to go.

Last year at the end of January, I had walked 45.2 miles total. I needed 1154.9 more miles to go in order to reach 1200. I still have 10 walking days left in January this year, and if I continue to average 4.82 miles-per-day, I will walk another 48 miles this month and at its conclusion, I will actually be closer to 1300 miles for the year, than I was on January 31, 2004 to reaching 1200 miles for that year.

In February, 2004 I only walked 68.0 miles. So, if things continue on track for 2005, at the end of February I should be way ahead of last year on reaching my yearly goal, even though it is 100 miles longer.

My weight this week ended with my weigh-in this morning of 185.0 pounds. I averaged 185.57, which I am happy with, especially after the jump up on Monday. My average points per day dropped from 53.43 down to 48.86, but my average weight dropped 0.22 also. I got in plenty of water, with at least 6 cups being consumed each day. For exercise, I walked 43.43 miles, and earned 109.73 aerobic points. Overall, I am very happy with how the week went.

Dotti and I are heading off to the coast this weekend finally, and we are really looking forward to it!

3 years, 256 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3" 239.5/185.0/180±2/BMI:23.12/WK-193

GRAPHS:

Weight Loss Maintenance Year 1 Maintenance Year 2 Maintenance Year 3 Maintenance Year 4 2005 Walking 2005 Walking Data

2004 Walking Data