Into Dingboche

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

Well, good, today in the Everest Challenge I made it "virtually" into Dingboche. That requires an accumulation of 320,300 steps or equivalent; as of tonight, I'm at 330,275 — just barely in there.

I've gotta say I'm really impressed with how some of the other "climbers" are doing, especially a certain fellow at University of Alaska Southeast whose recorded steps are at over 947,000 steps. That puts him "virtually" on the mountain (Everest, that is; not our own beloved Denali) at Camp 2. And since he doesn't seem to always record his steps every day, I'm betting that he's a good clip further along even than that. I don't have much doubt he's going to summit (1,291,300 steps or equivalent) before I've even made it to Camp 1 (798,300), which I'm not even halfway to yet. Good on ya, mate.

But I'm impressed beyond that. This is a great program, & it's good to see so many people participating. It's daily a topic of conversation between me & my two coworkers who are also participating; every day we're encouraging each other & reminding each other to do the extra stuff (drink water, do pushups & situps, be appreciative of the people we see in our daily lives) that will get us the daily 500 bonus points. And it's good to see people walking & doing other things to increase their daily fitness. May every participant make it all the way up the mountain, & down again, safely.

This week has continued to be a little screwy for me in terms of what's become my normal schedule of workouts. Tuesday, of course, was one such day — as discussed in previous post, Tax Day gunk prevented me from getting in the second half (high intensity interval training) of my Turbulence Training workout. But at least I got the strength portion in, which is equally important. But you just pick up & keep going. Wednesday morning I started the day with a 30-minute row & also got over 8,000 steps walking done during the workday, most of them during my lunchtime. This morning's row was shorter, just 16 minutes, but I did quite well with the walking, over 11,000 steps, most of them at work. This included a walk over to Admin to participate in one of the WIN events — a reading of my body comp (body fat percentage) & blood pressure — & back again, & a lunchtime walk through the spine across to Rasmusson Hall (former BEB) & back. I put my normal Thursday TT workout off until tomorrow because I had a writing even tonight which didn't leave me time for an evening workout.

All told, Wednesday got me 17,496 steps or their equivalent, & today got me 16,579.