This morning I decided to test “Stage 2” of my 2-month weight loss plan, which is walking two miles a day instead of one. One mile first thing in the morning, one mile before bedtime. Unfortunately, things didn’t go well. I’m still experiencing severe back pain early in the morning. I mistakenly thought by going ahead with the walk that the pain would subside, but instead it became worse. About a third of the way through the lap, my back began spasming every five or so steps. Each time it does that, my knees buckle and I get the sensation that I’m falling. I am always able to catch myself before falling down, but the strain on my knees and hips is immense. Halfway through the lap I deeply regretted not bringing my cell phone, as I would have definitely called Susan and begged for a ride home. With no other alternative but to continue walking, I did so. My average time around the mile the last couple of days has been 27 minutes — this morning, it took over 35. I’d still like to continue with my plan as I think it’s a good way to start the day, but I think tomorrow I’ll get up, take a few pain killers and wait for them to kick in before heading out the door.<\/p>\n

That being said, walking early in the morning is much different than walking at night. The first thing I noticed this morning was the birds! They were everywhere, loudly chirping and singing. Another thing I noticed was all the litter in my neighborhood. At night in the dark everything looks pretty clean; in the morning sun, you can see every piece of trash alongside the road. For the first time I also saw other walkers and joggers out and about. Most of them were hot young ladies out jogging, and I kind of chuckled when I thought to myself that to someone who’s into physical fitness, there is no more repulsive being to run into than myself. I’ll bet I inspired them all to burn a few extra calories this morning. The other thing I noticed is people backing out of their driveways. I would never have imagined that many people leave for work at 5:30am. Two or three times I had to wait for people backing out of their driveway. In the future I’ll spend less time watching the other joggers and more time looking for reverse tail lights.<\/p>\n

I forgot to mention, the reason I could hear the birds this morning was because I dropped my MP3 player the other day and destroyed it. I paid $100 for it used over a year ago so I wasn’t too torn up about it — after all, I see the death of old hardware as an excuse to upgrade! Over the past couple of days I began looking at iPods, but unfortunately the current generation of MP3 players have added LCD screens and now cost more because they play video. I don’t need a video player. If I’m on the road, I’ll watch videos in the car or on my laptop. The new 30 gig iPod runs $300 and plays both music and videos. After checking around, I went with a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, which has more hard drive space (40 gig vs. 30 gig) and was half the price ($149), but doesn’t play videos (which I’m okay with). My phone plays videos, my GP32 plays videos, I even have software for my Gameboy Advance to play videos. Not once have I ever even sorta kinda wanted to watch a video on any of those devices. Maybe I’m getting old but I’m missing the point of that technology.<\/p>\n

And by the way, 40 gig of music (at approximately 1 meg per minute) is 40,000 minutes or 666.67 hours of music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I decided to test “Stage 2” of my 2-month weight loss plan, which is walking two miles a day instead of one. One mile first thing in the morning, one mile before bedtime. Unfortunately, things didn’t go well. I’m still experiencing severe back pain early in the morning. I mistakenly thought by going ahead with the walk that the pain would subside, but instead it became worse. About a third of the way through the lap, my back began spasming every five or so steps. Each time it does that, my knees buckle and I get the sensation… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}