Between Tengboche & Dingboche

Note: My Start Walking posts can easily be found by clicking on the label Start Walking 2008.

Steady progress. Pretty steady anyway: yesterday was tax day, which had an impact on my workout because, typically, I waited until the last day to do anything about it. Filed my own online at lunchtime, & in the evening gave the boy (now 20) a crash course in preparing a federal tax return online. The upshot was that I only had time for half my three-days-a-week Turbulence Training workout.

But it hasn't all been that way. I had a really huge day last Friday. That's the day I generally take a break from rowing. Instead, I did a lot of dancing (60 minutes' worth over all) & a lot of walking — during lunchtime at work, shopping for groceries after work, & then, after putting the groceries away at home, another walk. This one took me up C Street — or rather, down, since I was descending into Chester Creek valley — from Fireweed to 15th Avenue (up a hill), then over to E Street & down a hill, turning to walk along Valley of the Moon Park, & up Arctic to Fireweed again, & then home. I picked this walk partly to avoid the snowy bike trails along Chester Creek that I'd walked the week before, & partly in order to get hills both coming & going, including that hill up Arctic that I used to walk almost every workday during the Start Walking program two years ago, when we lived down in that valley. At any rate, by the time the day ended, I'd put in 16,655 steps of actual walking, & with the dancing an equivalent of a total of 25,015 steps, which is thus far the highest I've done in any one day.

That's the day I came into Tengboche.

Saturday was a different kind of achievement. I got involved in a book I'm reading (Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes) & the day kinda passsed, & I didn't get the row I usually do in the morning, & followup in the evening with a TT workout. So, I thought, why not do the 10K row I've been doing on Sundays tonight instead? & I'll do the normal Saturday routine on Sunday? So I popped a movie into my laptop DVD player & hopped on the rower & rowed. Well, a 10K row takes me just under an hour, & the movie was an hour & a half, so when I got done with the 10K I thought, well, why not just keep rowing until the movie's over? So I did. That bought me another 5,266 meters — and new confidence that I am up to the challenge that I've been using these 10K rows to train for: a half-marathon (21,097 meters), which is just 5K more than I did that day. I will probably do it this coming weekend. Just have to have a long enough movie. (And maybe alternate padding for my tush, which did get a tad sore. On it's "Training for a Marathon" page, Concept 2 recommends bubble wrap, so I've laid in a supply.) My Saturday row, plus the paltry number of walking steps I did, brought me the equivalent of 24,546 steps.

The other days have been a bit more routine — morning row & evening TT workout on Sunday (17,252 steps or equivalent), morning 15-minute row & evening 30-minute row on Monday (18,479 steps or equivalent)— until Tuesday which I've already mentioned got messed up by also being Tax Day, & so got just 13,145 steps or equivalent. Still, I feel pretty darn good at what I'm accomplishing with my exercise as well as nutrition, especially after my "official weekly weigh-in" on Sunday found I'd lost another 3 pounds in the past week.