Once A Runner…

Another Evening Walk

I didn’t feel very well rested this morning when the alarm went off at 5:15, so I shut the fool thing off and crawled back under the covers. I guess I needed the extra hour and a half of sleep because I felt great when I did get up.

I spent most of the day finishing up in the garage, this time unloading the overhead, loft-like storage area and going through some boxes and hauling a few into the den for my wife to go through at her leisure so we can repack what’s to be kept into storage bins and carry them out to the shed, which we also reorganized today. It’s a fair trade. My wife finally got me to help clean up the garage and storage shed and to haul a ton of stuff off to donate to Goodwill, and I got half of the garage for the weights and benches.

While we were at finishing up in the garage, I decided I wasn’t pleased with the flexibility of the smaller bench I have — it’s not built to decline and will only incline to 45 degrees while I like to occasionally take it to 90 for seated military presses, etc. So, I donated the one I had and bought another. I also bought a weight tree to store the Olympic plates and bar better than just stacking them on either side of the big bench. If I’m going to keep it, I have to keep the “home gym” organized.

For this evening’s walk, I started a little slower than usual and gradually picked up the pace over time. It felt pretty good. I only had a couple of times there that the knees complained and they were much less bothersome than normal even when they did.

Calories consumed this time was a bit lower than usual. Two good reasons for that I guess:

• I had to dial down my weight to 192 pounds because that’s what I weighed this morning
• The pace was a little slower on average than usual

Still, take off another 299 calories towards the 3500 calories deficit I need to rack up for each pound I want to lose. I’m not counting calories with the changed eating regimen, but not eating processed foods, staying away from snack foods like chips, crackers, and cookies, and keeping to lean meats and fish, veggies, and fruit I reckon I’m probably cutting down my daily calorie consumption by a couple of hundred at least. That reduction taken with the calories burned by walking should be coming in right about 500 per day which is sufficient to take off a pound a week — what most physicians will tell you probably a safe rate of weight loss.

At this rate, especially not running yet, it’ll take me most of a year to make any appreciable headway, but it took me longer than that to put it on in the first place, so I’ll take it. I gotta believe adding in weight-training — now that the “home gym” is finally about set the way I wanted it — will help towards that even more.