7 Miles Walked Before 1

This morning I got an ambitious start by going down a long hill and by the time I turned around and started up I had gone nearly two miles. The hill has what seems like an increasing grade for .7 miles and that's a pretty good hill! I got to the top and my breathing testified to the work involved. I kept going to cool down and ended up doing 3.5 miles before 8:30. Other tasks up until right now have taken me another three and a half miles and the dog still hasn't done his thing. Soon it will be time for us to leave for soccer and I should get some laps around that field, so this looks like another big day. I am a little tired right now, but body tired, not brain tired. Plus, I checked the scale this morning and I was at 121.2 kilos, which means I lost another .7 kilos (or 1.54 pounds) again this week. Time for lunch!

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

Nine Miles In One Day

Big Man. Walking. Cold Rainy Day. New Daily RECORD. 9.25 miles.

For the most part I waited until the rain subsided. Definitely feels good - a good kind of tired.

Below is a table of the first four weeks of walking in 2008. The numbers are minutes and 20 minutes translates to a mile on Lime.com.


01/01/08 72 53 70 27 40 126 123
01/08/08 100 82 108 101 100 70 142
01/15/08 105 125 111 145 124 67 116
01/22/08 177 73 145 104 108 124 185

The chart starts on Tuesday and ends on Monday. Looks like Wednesday is the most challenging day to get my walking in and that makes sense given my schedule. I volunteer with Reality Changers on Wednesday nights in addition to picking our son up from soccer, so I probably don't walk much after 5 pm. Monday is the most prolific day. Two new records on Mondays and all four Mondays are in triple digits. My weekly totals are 511, 703, 793, and 916, so I have increased my total every week.

Keeping track allows me to see my progress and make comparison as well as gain insights into how or why, just like my realization about Wednesdays. If I choose, I can make sure I get up early Wednesday to get a good start so that I have lots of walking in before I pick up Stuart from soccer. I was able to keep track because I have a pedometer. It's not perfect, but I do think my pedometer is consistent. I have a friend who said he tried using a pedometer once and it was wildly inaccurate and he found that frustrating. My suggestion is to get a different pedometer. You can do it just like I am doing it. Keep reading and tell a friend who can use the encouragement.

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

8 Miles Before 5

I am reminded of some song lyrics and I can't quite remember the whole song or the title, but here they are:

Oh yes, I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to
I can do anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am...wait a minute, NOW I remember. OK, so I'm not WOMAN, but I did walk eight miles before five in the evening and it feels great. Still, they're inspirational and motivational lyrics and they were sung decades before (Was it before she was born?) that hot country gal sang that other song they have in that truck commercial. But, I digress...

I laid the foundation for a big day by getting a three mile walk in with the dog before I picked up our son, Stuart, from calculus class. What I have found helpful for me is by getting several miles in early, I can add to that a little at a time. Once I get beyond about three and a half miles total, I just want to keep going a little more even if it means walking while I wait for the Pick Up Stix order. That's what I did a little while ago. Instead of sitting there NOT TALKING to the other person waiting (Thank you, George Carlin...) for their order, I got up and told the kid who waited on me that I would be going for a walk and I would definitely be back. Little "bits" of walking here and there add up.

I want to remind you that I'm walking as a long term strategy to lose weight and feel better. My goals for the year are to lose 50 pounds of fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle. I will probably move on to bigger stuff later, but for now I'm simply walking to show that you can do it and that it produces results. However, I KNOW that billions and billions (Thank you, Carl Sagan...) of people can walk and so I'm here to encourage you and show you all the ways [strategies] you can walk short and long distances. There's nothing wrong with walking on a treadmill, but if you confine yourself to that, you might be missing out on some good exercise time in places you didn't expect.

I ran (walked?) into a neighbor and while our dogs were playing, I told him about my progress for the year and the Big Man Walking blog. He thought that was great and said that he used to run. And that is the point, really. Lots of people USED TO run. Walking is for just about everybody and as long as you don't try to prove how incredible you are through incredible feats of walking when you're not ready, walking is less likely to injure you, in my opinion. If you're not injured, you can walk and if you CAN walk, you're much less likely to say that you USED TO walk as many former runners say. (I have nothing against running, IF your body is ready for it.) I strongly suggest that you will get more exercise or at least create more long-lasting exercise habits if you do something that won't put you on the injured list. Recovery time? What if you don't have to recover in the first place? Walk. Just put one foot in front of the other. And keep track because it's motivating to see what you were doing and what you're doing now.

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

(Oh, and...use a pedometer.)

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Click on the title of this post to help the hungry in an amazingly simple way at FreeRice.com.

I Walked The Whole Thing!

Several years ago we noticed that a grade school friend of my son's lived waaayy down Unicornio street. I held on to that concept of their house being far away and never really measured it. If the distance to their house was a long way, then the distance all the way to the end of Unicornio MUST be a really long walk and the round trip, by extension, must be in the neighborhood of 4-6 miles, or so I thought. Their house is near the bottom of the hill and the walk is pleasant enough, but the walk back is not as fun uphill. When you add the steep uphill grade past their house, you've got a real walk.

When I started out a few weeks ago I drove to the area near their house and walked to the end of the street and back to the area near my car, proud of myself for overshooting and having to circle back to the Buick. I mentally declared my intention that day to walk from our house to the end of Unicornio and back "a couple months from now". I figured that I could come back every Sunday or so and park a little closer to our house and gradually make the walk longer. I thought I would do the whole walk sometime between late February and early April. Since then I have walked up to 4 miles or so in a single "walk" and my perception of what's possible has changed.

First, I realized that the walk down Unicornio might not be as long as I thought because of several walks I took in the area. I wasn't exactly sure how long it was, but I was confident I could do it. Second, I have done some of my walking up and down hills instead of just walking in relatively flat areas. After walking Mellow about half a mile for his daily constitutional, I decided to drop my jacket off at home along with the dog and went right back out alone in the cool air and bright sunshine. The first part was the easiest as I went from flat to downhill and then it changed pretty quickly to the steep uphill grade and that was taxing. I tend to walk at a pretty steady pace, so the uphill walk really made me work and I remember thinking "I'm not even halfway there yet!" My son was at church and my honey was in Florida. I had no cell phone. My car was at home. I knew as I kept walking that I was creating more work for my body as long as I had not yet reached the end of the street. I want to be clear that I was confident I could do this because of my experience walking over the past weeks. I know some people urge you to really go for it and that does work in many contexts, but knowing what you have been achieving recently or previously is a big help in deciding how big a bite you can chew.

My first priority is minimizing the possibility for injuring my body. That doesn't mean I can take all the risk out of the exercise. I am large and living that way is a risk in itself. The reason I want to minimize the possibility of injury is simple:
I want to keep walking and walking and walking. I don't want to put my body out of commission for a couple days or even a week or more. I'm not saying that my way is the only way. I value the ability to keep going and going and going day after day.

So now you know that this walk was a realistic goal on this day and not completely beyond what I had done previously. My biggest victory besides being able to honestly say that I had done it was the mental challenges I overcame. After I made it past the halfway point I knew that every step was literally bringing me closer to home, closer to my goal. Once I was past the steepest portion, the way home was uphill but at a more gradual pace. Along the way I had peeked at my pedometer and realized that the whole trek was not as long as my most conservative estimate. Upon reaching home I saw the this trip down Unicornio and the little streets to get there was only 2.6 miles! This had been a LONG street in my mind for years. Even starting out weeks ago when I realized my intention was to conquer it, I had no idea that I would do it before the end of January! I slayed the dragon. You can slay your dragons, too. Now I need to find bigger dragons to slay.

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

Force Strategies Versus Personal Growth

Earlier this morning I was waiting for my son to finish his shower so I could drive him to church. I knew I had about three minutes so I went to FreeRice.com and played their vocabulary game which is sort of like SAT preparation. You pick (or guess) which answer is correct our of four options. I could describe more, but you can click the link and simply go there and see it and play it within seconds. You score points with correct answers and rice is donated to feed the hungry. Each correct answer is worth 20 grains of rice. My top level was 47 and I ended up on level 41. (You automatically level down when you give a wrong answer.) I won/helped donate 840 grains of rice and over 100 MILLION grains were donated yesterday. One day. That's really good. People are having fun. Learning. Maybe humbling themselves. And hungry people are receiving food. A survival need is being met. Check it out!

When I got back just a bit ago, I read Ian Ayres's editorial, You Bet Your Life, in the Sunday L.A. Times Opinion section. He wrote about people making commitment contracts to keep themselves on track toward their goals. He had $500 on the line every week if he failed to reach his goals and he never had to write a check on his way to losing 25 pounds. Ayres teaches law at Yale University and if he had missed a goal, he would have written a check for $500 that week to a charity chosen by his colleague, Dean Karlan, who teaches economics at Yale. They co-founded stickK.com, which you can visit by clicking on the title of this post. Their method is simply one strategy for reaching a goal, meeting a need.

In my opinion, the reasons for you or I not reaching a goal are part of what personal growth or self-development are about. I believe that dealing with the underlying issues in your life and your unhelpful and unhealthful belief systems is the better way to go in the long run. Forcing yourself to pay money can definitely work in forcing yourself to reach your goals. I'm sure you can find ample evidence on their website or in their writings. I'm suggesting that it's not the only strategy that works. The threat of paying money may force you to take certain actions, but it doesn't necessarily tell you WHY that threat is necessary. Self-development can take away the need for using that strategy. We'll see if FreeRice.com's educate and entertain yourself strategy (what I might call elementary personal growth or self-development) works in the long run. But it's working now and I expect that if you visit FreeRice.com and tell others about it, soon they will be donating 1 BILLION grains of rice per day and maybe, soon after than 100 Billion or even 1 TRILLION.

Now I'm going to go for a walk.

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Visit FreeRice.com and then visit Lime.com and register (use a pseudonym if you like - I'm Dr. Network there AND Leftcoastman here) and keep tracking of your steps and your minutes and your miles.

Every Step You Take

Every step you take.

Increases fitness. Increases bone density. Increases quality of life.

This is the slogan of Optimal Health Products. I'm not vouching for their products nor am I taking a stance against their products. I do like their slogan very much. Every Step You Take...

I encourage you to walk. Always. Every waking hour. Before I sat down to this laptop I walked, on purpose, 101 steps inside our home. You might be surprised how many steps you walk in an hour. (Although it's possible you'll be surprised at how few you are walking, too. A friend from Toastmasters said she was sure she was walking 10,000 steps a day, which is what her friend told her to do. She got a pedometer and found out it was 900! She walks more now.) I urge you to walk at least 33 steps an hour extra, which is in the neighborhood of an extra quarter mile a day. My 101 steps repeated every hour is in the neighborhood of three quarters of a mile a day. Slightly more than 1/4 of a mile extra a day is 100 extra miles a year and three quarters of a mile extra a day is three times that or 300 extra miles a year. My 101 extra steps took me about a minute. I keep mentioning extra because we need to do MORE than we are currently doing.

One of our needs is for exercise. Almost anyone can walk, which is a strategy to get exercise (and to increase bone density and quality of life). 101 steps an hour is a strategy to make the exercise/task doable and memorable for you. My hope is that over time, you will do more. Or you can walk a half marathon or full marathon today - IF you're prepared. I'm not prepared for that today. One of these days I will be. A little bit more and then a little bit more and pretty soon I'm there. Or you're there.

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

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Visit an awesome website - FreeRice.com - to help feed people while teaching you by clicking on the title of this post. Did you notice the Free in front of rice?

Almost 3.5 Miles By 9:30 Almost

My dog wanted to go out so we did a mile before 7:30 this morning and then I went to get the paper. A little while after coming back home I found my son was still sleeping and decided to do a couple more miles. I walked the "Big Block", which in my lingo is all the way around about a quarter of our "greater neighborhood". [Ya hadda be there?] For locals it's Xana Way to Alga, then Melrose north to Carrillo Way and back around to Xana in the simplest way possible.

During the descent towards Carrillo Way I noticed that I felt the lactic acid burn in my left calf more than in my right (a first) and I wondered if that might be because I'm right-handed and therefore probably right-footed, too. I also noticed that I was moving pretty fast and some people might consider this pace speed walking. I just knew it was cold and I was moving fast enough to keep warm. Maybe I finally reached the threshold of making my calves do some extra work. Half a mile later while I was coming up the hill I noticed that the lactic acid in my left calf had lessened and both calves felt the same another quarter mile later as the terrain leveled out. I'll ask Christine Burke at Fitness Together about it. When I got back home my pedometer said almost 3.5 miles and it was a little past 9:30 (on Saturday!).

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

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I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I like walking and writing about it is that about 99% of us can do it. I found the site of someone who may prove that MORE than 99% of us can do it. Her name is Stacey James and she's a motivational speaker who was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident. The motto on her website is "Equipping people to rise above the challenges of life." She's at WalkingVictorious.com.

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Remember FreeRice.com.

A Walk Before Toastmasters

If you've never been to Toastmasters, you should visit one or two clubs near you. We learn how to be more comfortable speaking in a group or in public. I've been a member of Expressions Unlimited, our Carlsbad club, for almost eight years. I found a club that's a good fit for me with some great people. Today at noon I was the Toastmaster of the day, which means that I'm the one running the meeting. Each meeting has a theme and mine was walking. Surprise. The meeting went well and our enthusiastic members really would have made you feel at home if you had been there. If you google expressions unlimited toastmasters, you can easily find the club blog. You can also check out the LINKS section of Big Man Walking over on the right of this page. I hope you visit a club and if you're near Carlsbad, California I hope you'll come see us.

This morning I took dropped my son off for calculus and instead of going home and puttering around for 10 minutes I went straight to Toastmasters. I was just over 45 minutes early and so I decided to take a walk. Our club is near the ocean and I could hear the waves as I walked to the southwest. I found a staircase I hadn't explored before and went down to the beach, stopping on the bottom step. I like finding ways to take a walk in street clothes as I hope to show people that walking more frequently can also be fairly convenient. I spent a few minutes taking in the beautiful view of the ocean on this cold, clear day. I had a smile on my face as I turned to go back up to the street and I walked to Fresco Trattoria on Carlsbad Village Drive. I sometimes see bumper stickers referring to this area that say something like "Locals call it Elm." I guess there was controversy over the name change some years back.

I realized that I didn't need to go to 101, which many people call Pacific Coast Highway or PCH, so I went back toward the beach and walked the path at street level which ends up along 101 as it sidles up against the Pacific. I stopped at the 30 MPH sign across 101 from the Tamarack Beach Resort and turned to go back to my Toastmasters meeting. Along the way I had a quick conversation with a woman reading a book on the bench titled The Best Travel Writing: True Stories from Around the World 2006. She said she liked the book and really liked our beach and places to walk in Carlsbad. I said goodbye and walked back past Fresco Trattoria again on my way back to Heritage Hall at Magee Park where Expressions Unlimited meets. My pedometer said I had walked 1 1/4 miles, some of it briskly and some of it leisurely, and then I was really ready for Toastmasters and my theme of the day: Walking. My walk took me 27 minutes.

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

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I really think FreeRice.com is a fantastic idea. Click on the title of this post to go there.

I See Bike People

Maybe it's just me, but now that I've been walking purposefully for almost a month, I sense some solidarity with the people riding bikes. I've given the thumbs up a couple times and turned some heads. The same goes for runners, which is kind of like doing what I'm doing, only faster. I notice how many people are out walking, running and biking and there are a lot of us.

Some of the bicycle riders seem to be having fun and some look pretty darn serious. I've observed that runners almost always look serious. These are just some observations from someone who seems to have discovered a view of the world that he had been missing. Are you missing it? Like John Lennon sang, "I hope someday you'll join us..."

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I'm going to stick with this website for a while. Please send your friends to Big Man Walking and tell them to click on the title of the post. Send them to http://TheBigManWalking.blogspot.com.
By clicking on the title of the post you'll be taken to...you'll see. What a genius idea. People are having fun, learning and people are getting fed! I love the internet sometimes.

Walking While People Watching

I dropped my son off for calculus and found a parking space that was further away from the campus than I had hoped. No problem. I'll just walk a little more. He just has 50 minutes of class at the campus today, so there's no reason to go back home. I walked to the northern classrooms and back down to the student union several times and while I did that I watched the people. Mostly young. College students seem amazingly young. I remember Dana Carvey on the Tonight Show with that other host...what was his name? Oh, yeah...Johnny Carson. Johnny commented on how young he looked and he said something like, "You should have seen me when I FIRST started. I looked like a fetus with shoes." I wouldn't quite go that far, but maybe embryonic is close. (And if you don't KNOW who Dana Carvey is, you might be really young. Ever seen the movie Wayne's World? He plays Garth.)

I liked seeing all the different faces and hearing the occasional bits of cell phone conversation. I saw people in earnest conversation in the student union. Some people sitting alone. A group telling each other stories loudly outside the bookstore. Two different guys greeting to different girls with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and tilt of the head. A dozen people about my age.

I only noticed one other person out of hundreds who seemed to be walking for exercise and I remembered a conversation with the dad of one of my son's friends. He is in good, even great shape and I think that's why he thinks of walking as boring. His wife was training for a half-marathon or something and he ran with her just to keep her company. I guess that if you can RUN a half-marathon, walking might seem that way. We all have to start somewhere. Plus, when you actually start walking more, if you pay attention, you'll see and hear things while you walk that are actually interesting. I urge you to walk more, even if you are like the guy I wrote about in the previous post who started out unable to do 40 yards. If you can do nothing else, you can do an extra 100 steps a day. I know that's not true for so many of you. Can you do 30 extra steps an hour? That's in the neighborhood of a quarter mile a day. I'm sure you can do a quarter mile, half mile, mile or two or more from the start. Measure your walking and exercise in general against your past performance. With walking, using a pedometer is an easy way to measure, provided you get one that works. I like my step pedometer and that's what I recommend until I explore other pedometric (I'm pretty sure that's a word.) options. The thing is, whether it's 100 steps or 5000 steps or more, you must take that first step. Take that step today.

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

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My honey met someone in Florida who told her about a site where we can have a little fun, pass a little time, learn a little and truly be of service to people. It's called FreeRice.com and they gave away a lot of rice yesterday and they will again today. They are feeding people and you can (essentially) play a game to help feed those people. Awesome. What a genius. I think for the foreseeable future I will put that link under the title of each post.

Walking By The Pool

National Weather Service confirms that technically speaking, it's C-O-L-D here. I was walking the dog a little bit ago and saw two guys in the pool area. One was walking in the pool and it's not the first time. The other was in our complex's jacuzzi. I got to talking with guy in the pool who said he's 67 and a couple years ago he couldn't walk 40 yards. Now he walks in the pool for exercise on a regular basis and can walk a mile at a time. I hope you can walk more than 40 yards, but if you can't right now our "pool guy" is a hopeful sign for you. I told him that I've walked around 120 miles since January 1 and he told me to keep it up. That's how he started to tell me his story. Walking can open up conversations with people you haven't met before, if you let it. There's a little bit of a feeling that we're all in this (struggle?) together. Join us.

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

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Click on the title of this post to read about water or pool walking.

12 Minute Walk

You can walk a few extra minutes when you get the mail or go out to find something in the car or when you knock on a neighbor's door. Stay outside and walk 10 or 12 more minutes or even 5 or 6. I saw that I had a little time before the phone call to my honey in Florida and took the dog out for about 12 minutes. I walked about half a mile. Even a quarter of a mile extra per day adds up over 365 or 366 days. If you walk just a little bit over a quarter of a mile extra per day, during the course of a year, you will have walked an extra 100 miles.

My trainer friend, Christine Burke, tells me that 1 mile burns 100 calories on average and 3500 calories burned is what it takes to lose one pound. So, for a little effort beyond whatever you're currently doing, you can lose approximately three EXTRA pounds per year. Doesn't seem like much, you say? Well, if you think of it the opposite way...that you UNDERexercised that much per year. That would mean you GAINED an extra three pounds per year and that's how you can put on an extra 30 pounds over 10 years. Plus, if you actually lost the extra weight instead of gaining it, the difference between what you could have gained and what you actually lost over 10 years adds up to 60 pounds!

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.