The Walking Man Walks On By...

December 29th, 2018.

That day's walk was five and a half miles.

Which put me at 2020 miles for the year.  My lovely wife was with me for 370 of them, including the last dozen miles. I could never have done it without her encouragement.

A special thank you to Dawn, Bob, Marcia, David, Jon, Martin, Debbie, Aaron, Amy, Michelle, and so many others who were a constant source of encouragement.

Plus a VERY special thank you to Lori, Sarah, Cheri and the rest fo the folks down at Prestogeorge Coffee & Tea for keeping me caffeinated throughout all my travels

Some stats:

• Walked 338/363 days this year.
• Average of 5.97 miles per day.
• Twenty-nine days walking at the Pittsburgh Mills mall.
• Sixteen days where I did 10+ miles.
• Five pairs of shoes.
• Two half-marathons.
• Over 18,000 photos.
• Over 1,000 photos of abandoned clothing.
• Shed 15 pounds, and went through two new belts.

Goals for next year?

1. Walk in 19 new locations for 2019.
2. Lose 19 pounds in 2019 - get down to 180.
3. Write 190k words in 2019 - 3700 words per week.

As an adjunct to #3, I intend to finish a novel this year, and publish it; either indie, or trad.

One way or another.

Here's to 2019!

Walking Man

So, I've been walking this year.

A lot.

Earlier this year, I decided that my goal for this year would be to try and walk 2018 miles in 2018.

As of today, I'm on my fifth pair of shoes for the year, and I have just a little bit under 100 miles to go to reach that goal.

As of tomorrow - if I can get out and do my daily walk as planned - I will have walked twice as much this year as I have last year.  Including running two (official) half marathons, and walking several unofficial "What the heck, let's see fi we can do 13 miles today" hikes.

I don't want to walk nearly as much next year.  I'm happy that I set myself a hard goal, and very happy that I'm going to meet it... but walking 5+ miles every day gets old fast.  I do like to take a longer walk every now and then, but I think I will enjoy my time much more if I don't have to focus on mileage.

So I think my goal for 2019 will be to walk in 19 new cities.  That should actually be pretty easy - I think I've managed a good two dozen different locations outside of Pittsburgh proper this year, just looking for new places to wander.

When I first started walking last year, I was doing it for my health.  Now, I'm doing it because it's a habit, and because I enjoy visiting new places and taking pictures of interesting things along the way.  I've been posting my photographs on Facebook, but I've been experimenting with using Flickr instead these days.  If you'd like to take a look, you can find me there as Walking Samrobb.

Wow. Been a while.

Sorry for that.  I've had a bit of a lot going on lately, you see.

Some things that are going on...

• I've been walking.  Like, a lot.  Easier on these old knees than running.  My goal is 2018 miles in 2018, and I'm currently at 1846 miles.  On track to complete that.  Yay!
• Oh, well.  Walking is easier than running, but I've done some of that, too.  Two half marathons, in fact.  The first was - kind of - an accident (at least the running part); the second was to prove to myself that the first wasn't a fluke.  (Spoiler warning: it wasn't! :)
• I've been working as a moderator/admin on another web site.  Takes time.  Totally worth it.  We save lives, one person at a time.
• MY company got bought out.  By the Evil Empire, which these days, seems to be the Least Evil Empire.  Maybe even the Somewhat Cool For A Company That Age Empire.  Liking it a lot so far, at least.
• I've been working on loosing weight.  Approaching my goal of getting under 200 pounds for the first time in three decades or so.
• I've been writing.  Like, a lot.  Successfully completed NaNo this year.  In fact, I ended up writing the story before the story I wanted to write, so I've got 70k of Book 1 written and about 30k of Book 2 queued up and ready to go.

So, yeah.  A lot going on.  For various reasons, I'm starting to think that FaceBook ain't the place to be anymore, so I've been checking out MeWe and generally liking the more quiet nature of life over there.

Goals for next year are still pending.  One of them will be to publish something.  Actually, I've got three somethings in the works.  Let's see how many of them make the grade.

So, there you have it.  Hopefully some more writing snippets will be going up sometime in the near future. My first novel is going to be a tender, sensitive book about a young man coming of age on the streets of Pittsburgh as he questions his childhood relationships, his family's strictures, and his place in society as a whole.

... nah, just kidding.  It's about graffiti writers who kick the living snot out of creatures from Faerie that try to screw around with their city.  Because if there's one thing that Pittsburghers hate more than Browns fans, it's eldritch horrors from beyond that make it hard to go shopping in the Strip.

In Which I Learn I Am Not The Flash

Youngest Daughter was home "sick" today. She was running a slight fever last night, and school rules say no attendee if you had a fever in the past 24 hours. Understandable, really - sick kids plus norovirus equals justifiable paranoia. Meanwhile, Eldest Daughter had a college visit scheduled for today, and while I can work from home, I can't work from a college visit... so the lovely Mrs. escorted the Alldaughter on her visit, while I stayed home with my poor, sick little kiddo fiddo puddin' pie.

Who, of course, woke up feeling just peachy keen. Sigh... kids.

Meanwhile, my team lead ran in the Boston Marathon today. While he's a hair older than me, he's in excellent shape, and enjoys running. In the time that I've known him, I think he's easily run probably a dozen marathons. Not my cup of tea - I struggle with a 5K - but hey, good for him, right?

So I was at home this morning, doing code reviews, and keeping track of the race results. Pulling for my boss, don'cha know. Around 11:30, I knocked off, and told the youngest we were going to head out, take the dog for a walk, and then go get a special treat. She loves Taco Bell, her sisters despise it, so she always gets outvoted when we get something on the go. So whenever I can, I try to take her out for her favorite fast food concoction: two steak quesadillas, which are apparently made with a grilled meat-like substance, spicy cheese, and a sprinkling of crack cocaine.

I admit that I tried to talk her out of her last slice. I have no shame.

We had a lovely stroll through the park, perhaps a mile and a half all told, with a very happy black lab who wanted nothing more than to stop and sniff all the sniffs he could sniff. Once we were done, he got to hang his head out the window as we took the back route from the park and headed for the Bell. A nice, leisurely eight mile drive there, a quick jaunt through the drive through, and...

You can see where this is going, right?

We get home, I check the race results, and... HE'S FINISHED THE RACE.

In under three hours.

OK, yeah, it was a long lunch break, and we weren't walking particularly fast, but... seriously?

HE RUNS MARATHONS FASTER THAN I CAN EAT LUNCH.

Ima go stuff another quesadilla in my face to comfort myself :-(

What A Drag It Is...

After a decent start, a decent couple of weeks.  Hitting the gym and the treadmill has allowed me to rack up just under five miles, albeit spread out over five days.

On the plus side, I don't have much trouble at all with a 15 minute run, which is light years ahead of where I started a few years ago.

On the minus side, while my left knee is doing OK, my right one is bugging me now.  I had to curtail today's run because I was starting to feel a little funny in the kneeticular region.  A co-worker recommended compression knee sleeves.  I may have to give that a try.

Sigh... yeah, Mick and his friends were pretty much spot on.

Back In The Saddle Again

Fifteen minutes.  One mile.  Heart rate 175.

Not bad for having taken almost a year off.  I was worried that I would have to start off all over again from the beginning, and that if I really pushed myself, I might be able to manage a half mile.  Apparently, though, it takes more than a year of relative inactivity for your cardiovascular system to completely reset.  A fact that I was quite happy to realize.

I feel good now; we'll just have to see how I feel come the morrow.  Aching muscles I can deal with - that's just a matter of stretching, patience and time.  If my knee is hurting again, though, I may have to start considering a lower-impact workout.

If the knee holds up?  My ultimate goal is to get back to where I was a year ago: 36 minutes, 3 miles, all at a heart rate 160, three times a week.

Here's hoping.

C25K : The Penultimate Post

In my last running update, I noted that I had managed to make it into week four of the Couch To 5K program.  Despite setbacks, with a new pair of decent running shoes, I had pushed myself to the limit, and was jogging for up to five minutes at a time!  Since then, though... silence.

There is a reason for that.

I have been very, very busy... and one of the things that I have been busy with is running.

No, I did not abandon the program.  I kept with it, and I have to tell you, it worked for me.

By the end of September, I was up to running a mile at a time, which took be around 15 minutes.  At that point, colder weather rolled in, and running outside became too much of a chore.  I despise running in the cold [1], so I was kind of annoyed that I waited so long to start the program that my last few weeks would be miserable.  I could easily see myself letting my running schedule slide when faced with the prospect of having to run in the cold, rain and sleet.

Fortunately, at that point, my place of employment moved into some nice new digs.  Nice new digs that happened to be just two blocks away from the Sarah Heinz House.  While the SHH is primarily a youth center, geared towards offering kids after-school programs, those all happen after 2PM... so for the first half of the day, they (and their rather nice little gym) are open to adult members.

Even better, because of those limitations, their adult membership prices are dirt cheap.  And by "dirt cheap", I mean about a quarter of what you might pay for a membership at a "real" gym.

Two blocks away.  Cheap.  Treadmills in the workout room.  A very noticeable lack of wind, rain, sleet, and cold.

How could I pass all that up?  I plunked down the cash for a month's pass to try it out.

So I started running on a treadmill, and loved it.  By the middle of November, I was banging out two and a third miles in about 30 minutes.  That's around a 13 minute mile.  So, yeah - I am not a speed demon by any definition.  Keep in mind, though, that three months ago, I was deliriously happy that I managed to shuffle along for 60 seconds without puking up a lung.

I repeat: the whole Couch To 5K thing?  It worked for me.

So there I am.  Middle of November.  Almost at the end of the program.  All that is left, really, is for me to buckle down and actually, you know, do the last little bit.

Run a 5K.

Which brings us to... the Turkey Trot.

[1] This is what is known as "foreshadowing".

C25K: Finishing Week Four

Well, we had a bit of a delay in our running schedule.  Being on vacation took a toll, in a good way - it was hard to muster up the energy to run when we were exhausted from swimming all day.  We returned home rested and ready for week three, when I did something incredibly stupid (at least, in hindsight).

I bought some new inserts for my shoes.  Nice, cushy inserts with a wonderfully padded heel.

They felt wonderful when I was running.  The following day?  Not so much.  Both my knees were effectively immobile, and I felt like I had hot needles sitting just under inner portion of my knees.  A discussion with my boss at work (who's a marathon runner) about shoes gave me an inkling of an idea that the inserts might be a problem.  So when I got home, I took them out, and the pain in my knees diminished almost immediately.

Sigh.  OK, trash one set of inserts.

Even with that, the pain in my knees persisted - I treated them with Aleve and ice for several days before I felt like I would be able to run again.  At that point, I decided that while my current shoes were comfortable, they were pretty much too trashed to continue running in.  So my next step would be to find a pair of running shoes to that would let me run without further destroying my knees.

After soliciting recommendations from various runners, I found a store that would do a gait analysis, and tell me what kind of shoes I should be wearing.  Which is exactly what I wanted, since I was completely ignorant and unable to answer the questions that experienced runners asked me about my arch, roll, and what-have-you.  They managed to set me up with a nice pair of Nikes, which felt great.

At which point, halfway through week three, we all got sick.  Bleah.  This seems to be an inevitable consequence of the start of the school year.  There's a reason why the Lovely Mrs. Robb and I refer to kids as "cute little petri dishes".

Anyways - that knocked us back, yet again.  So doing Week 3 of the program actually ended taking up... um.  Two and a half weeks?  Closer to three weeks?  Something like that.  Eldest Daughter and I ended up repeating a day of the Week 3 program, just because it felt like we should.

We kept up with it as best we could, though, through bum knees, bad shoes and a bad cold.  The end result being that this was Week 4, and we're now running (well, jogging) for 5 minutes at a time.  I measured it - that's a whole half of a mile that I'm managing to blast through; not once, but twice during a session.

Woot!

We still have one more day of Week 4 to complete, then we get into Week 5... where we will be hitting what is (for me) a major milestone at the end of the week: ramping up each day until we are running for 20 minutes straight.  I will be very honest, and say that if I can manage that by the end of next week, I will be freaking amazed.  I suspect that it will take a couple of tried before I am able to reach that goal.

I am incredibly happy with the progress we've made, though.  To top it all off, I've also managed to loose about 10 pounds in the process - though I think that is more an result of making the effort to eat more salads and fewer french fries.  At 220 right now, I am hardly svelte, but frankly, this is the best shape that I have probably been in for two decades.

Which makes me quite happy!

C25K: On to Week Two

So, Eldest Daughter and I have managed to finish week 1 of our Couch to 5k training.  One week down, eight left to go!

I'm really happy with this first week.  After the first day, my feet hurt, my back hurt, and my legs hurt.  Thankfully, the program only calls for three days of training a week, so that meant I had a day to rest and recuperate.  (Eldest Daughter, having the vitality and resilience of youth, had no such problems.)  After the second day, it was more of the same, only... less so.  I expect that after today's session [1], I will be no more than a little stiff tomorrow.

Now, keep in mind that this first week is really tame. You jog for a minute, then walk for a minute and a half.  Lather, rinse, repeat for a total of 20 minutes.  As light as that workout is, though, I could feel the difference between the sessions.  The first one was a real struggle to complete.  The second, not nearly as bad... and today's session, even less of a issue.  I mean, yeah, I was panting like a dog and sweating like a pig, but that's to be expected.  The jogging/walking itself, though?  Not a big deal.

I was actually looking forward to today's session.  Seriously.  If you knew how I usually feel about running, you would know how strange that is.  Imagine how I must feel, waking up and thinking, "Oh, hey!  We get to run today!"

So, apparently, my head is in the right space, at least.  My body will get there, too.  Eventually.

Next week, we up ante.  Jog for a minute and a half, then walk for two minutes.  The goal, after all, is to eventually work up to the point where we can jog 5k without stopping.  Given this week, I am looking forward to it.  What we've done so far has primed me for it, mentally speaking. I know that the first session of the week will be tough... but I also know that I can push myself and get through it, and that after that, completing the next couple of sessions will get increasingly less difficult to accomplish.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  I'm all psyched about working my way up to running jogging for a whole ninety seconds at a time.  Baby steps, man.  Baby steps.

[1] I say "session", because this isn't a running program - it's a jogging program, really; and until the seventh week, it's really a jogging/walking program.

C25K: Week 1, Day 1

So, the Eldest Daughter and I got up off the couch and embarked upon our 5K journey today.  On the menu for this first week: three days, each one consisting of 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.  Add in a five minute warmup walk before hand and another five minute cooldown walk at the end, and that's a good half hour of movement.

I put the free C25K trainer app from Zen Labs on my phone, and we headed out to our starting point up the road, where there's a nice little neighborhood to run in.  It has all the qualities a beginning runner could want in a course.  Quiet, virtually zero traffic, and most especially, practically flat.  The later condition is a particularly nice bonus here in western Pennsylvania.

All that we really had to do was start up the trainer, and do what it told us to do.  When the nice lady on my phone said "run", we ran.  When the nice lady said "walk", we walked.  Easy peasy!

Well.  That's the theory, anyways.  In practice, there was a whole lot more effort involved.  If I wanted to describe the actual event itself as it unfolded, I would have to haul out terms like "wheezing", "panting", and "physical wreck of a human being"... but not terms like "regurgitation", "dry heaves" and "collapse", which makes me feel quite happy.

As for Eldest Daughter, she is in far, far better shape than I am, as witnessed by the fact that she could manage to talk in between the jogging sessions. [1]  Me?  I just gasped.  Yet, despite my obvious physical flaws, we managed to finish our first day or running without any major catastrophes.  

Initial impression: They nailed this.  I am their target demographic.

I started off thinking that I might have to repeat this first week a couple of times to get up to speed.  I mean, I'm a sedentary middle aged desk jockey, for crying out loud.  I'm not even a level 1 runner; I'm more like a level 0 runner with d4 HP and a CON penalty.

However... twice while we were jogging, just as I thought, "That's it, I'm done, I can't run any more", the trainer app chimed and told me "Start walking".  A couple of other times, just as I was thinking, "Just a few more steps, come on..." the same thing happened.  Overall, it seems like the routine pushed me just as hard as it could, without pushing me to the point of feeling discouraged.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a pretty major win.  Not being able to keep up with the very first day's workout would have been incredibly demotivating.  As it stands, though, I finished up and thought, "Holy cow.  I can do this!"

Seriously.  I never thought I'd say this, but I'm excited about this now.  I'm looking forward to the next time we get to go out.  I've already done it once, so I know I can do it again... and after that, it's just a matter of doing it step by step until I get to the end.

[1] She's a teenage girl.  If she ever stopped talking for more than a few minutes, I think I'd be alarmed enough that I'd take her to the ER.

C25K

So.

Apparently, this is A Thing.

More specifically, it is A Thing that I will be doing with my eldest daughter, starting next week.

Oy.

Hopefully getting into a running routine (while also avoiding snacks between meals) will help improve my general health, well-being, and allow me to loose those 20-30 pounds of tasty, tasty carbs that I'm currently lugging around.

Let's see how it works out.  It certainly seem simple enough that even I should be abel to keep up with it.  You can see the schedule for the first two weeks below.  Plus, y'know.  Daughter.  Can't let her down.  Even if I might be willing to slack off on my own part, I've got another reason entirely to make it work.

Week	Workout 1	Workout 2	Workout 3
1	Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.	Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.	Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.
2	Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 90 seconds of jogging and two minutes of walking for a total of 20 minutes.	Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 90 seconds of jogging and two minutes of walking for a total of 20 minutes.	Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 90 seconds of jogging and two minutes of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

Help keep me honest, folks.