Working

I'm so close! I'm at 200.6 pounds. I just need to break that 200 pound mark and I will have achieved my first goal. Then it will be down to 195 and that's where I hope to stay. I started dieting and increased workouts back on August 27 of 2014. I weighed 245 at that time. I figure it's close to 6 months and that works out to 7.5 pounds per month.

People claim that you feel so much better and have more energy when you lose weight. They are right. Also, you get new clothes! And you can wear the good old clothes from the past. I can now wear all of my favorite Hawaiian shirts that I so wisely saved.

I should be under 200 pounds by the 22nd of this month and that is when I will be entering my first race in close to 7 years. It's just a 5K walk and I used to do this particular one as a race walker; always winning fastest men's time. Now, I'm half afraid to use the race walking stride as it uses so much hip motion. (That's one reason it looks so funny to Americans. Not so much to Europeans who are well versed in race walking.) With four vertebrae fused and a having a cranky sacral nerve, I don't want to cause myself an injury. So I will probably go slow this time.

I've been keeping myself fit by using the gym and the pool. In the pool I do deep water jogging; back and forth, back and forth. For 30 minutes each time I'm in the gym. This is incredibly boring so I have fashioned a set of earphones with a Clip holding about 600 songs. I put a hat over the whole assembly to keep it from falling in the water.

Even with music, my mind is restless and so I find myself remembering some of the more memorable projects I was involved in. I replay them all in my head as I 'jog'. Here, where we live, there are no retired commercial and high rise construction workers to swap stories with. But I did find a retired architect to talk with. He had a lot more back surgery than I did but the gym and pool are helping him as well. Anyway, we do a lot of talking about projects, big and small. It helps.

My other blog Working tells some of those stories