The Benefits of Walking & Oh God There's a Snake (Day 243)

This post is for Wednesday, April 14th, 2010.

This morning began with me on the spin bike for an hour since I couldn't run. My aggrivated leg muscle felt fine on the bike. I headed to to the gym after the spin and walked uphill for 30 minutes and then hit the elliptical for 15 more minutes. I felt a little tightness in my right quad during the treadmill walk, but otherwise felt fine. I trained back after the cardio. 3 sets of pull-downs, 3 sets of hammer strnegth rows, 3 sets of y-bar rows, and finally 3 sets of straight arm press downs.

After the gym I returned home with plans to go on multiple dog walks during the day so I still hit my goal of a 4000+ calorie burn on the day. I began the dog walking with one of my big dogs, Daisy, and Jumping Jack Flash. We walked an easy two miles (for me and Jack anyway, Daisy was tired by the end of the walk) during mid afternoon. A little later I took another one of our bigger dogs, Zoey for a walk. She and I went alone so she wouldn't get distracted with Jack and would stay close to me so she could spend a little time off leash. She loves to swim and took no fewer than three swims in the lake. My final walk of the evening was with Kim and the Pug. Same two miles. Easy as can be. The excitement of the day came during the first walk. I was lost in thought concerning the benefits of walking and the calories I was burning on a very leisurely walk (more on this in a bit) when I noticed Jack has attacked something and was doing battle off to my right. I quickly grab Daisy's leash with both hand just as she takes off in a dead sprint to join in. Daisy is a good sized dog. About 90 or so pounds. She's strong. She nearly ripped my arm off and drug me behind her. But I held her back and then brought my attention back to Jack. I was worried that he'd caught a baby rabbit or a little squirell or some other cute furry woodland creature. I feared I was gonna have to seperate him from the animal and then see how badly it was hurt, and decide if I needed to put it down or not. Not to worry, the cute furry critter wasn't so warm and fuzzy after all. He'd attacked a snake. Now I considered releasing Daisy into the fray. I yelled at Jack to stop and to my amazement, he flipped the snake high into the air and trotted off. Daisy and I went to investigate. We found a healthy snake who seemed quite scared of us.


My thoughts before the snake encounter about exercise, walking etc. left me thinking about the matter all evening. I use a bodybugg to track my calorie burn each day and I know pretty well how much I usually burn when running, training, walking, resting, etc. I had never really thought about it much, but today I realized you can get a tremendous benefit from walking alone. I was unable to run an inch today, but I still burned well over 4100 calories. I did much more cardio time wise today than I would have done if I'd been able to run, but still, that's a lot to burn doing all low intensity cardio. The key in this thought process is ANYONE can do what I did this afternoon. You might not be able to walk 3 different 2 mile walks the first day you start, but you could do something and build your way to multiple calorie burning walks each day. If you're already losing weight by calorie restriction (like a NS type diet) but haven't been getting any exercise, adding some easy paced walks will help with your weight loss significantly.

Daisy pictured below...


Good day with my meals. Breakfast was the usual coffee and granola cereal, morning snack of a protein shake, lunch was a chicken breast and a granola bar, afternoon snack was a NS white chocolate chunk cookie, and dessert was ice cream. Dinner was a tragedy. Kim prepared a huge pot of black beans with vegetables and I grilled mahi mahi. While bringing it inside, I accidentally dropped both pieces onto the very dirty garage floor. I screamed. The mahi mahi looked so good. I ended up having a left over chicken breast and Kim had egg beaters. I felt terrible.

Photo below is Jack doing his thing, chasing everything he can at the lake.