Today was a fun day of Geocaching. I found three caches, struck out on two. The last one was an adventure in getting lost in white people suburbia. I had set out to find GCH3CZ, so I parked at the recommended dead-end street at the trailhead. Somehow I got off trying to go to the coordinates for GCYK7E instead, which is near the same neighborhood. I took off down a mountain bike trail for a mile. It wasn’t feeling right because I was going west a lot and I knew it was in a northern direction, but the trail was looping around a lot so I kept on going. I wound up in the back yard of some houses, I knew at that point something was wrong. I punched in what I thought was the parking spot for GCH3CZ to backtrack, but it was really turned out to be the trailhead for GCYK7E. blah! I didn’t know the neighborhood (who pays attention when you’re going 20 mph on a bicycle?), so I walked about two more miles finding the right street and back across the neighborhood to where I had parked my truck.
It was nearing sunset, cool outside, so parents and their kids were out in their front yards were playing. Fortunately I didn’t see any spooked parents grab their kids and whisk them inside as my dirty and stinky presence was made.
One pound of fat is about 3,500 calories. To lose eight to ten pounds in a month through exercise, a person would need to burn at least 7,000 calories a week, or 1,000 calories a day. I’ve been trying to get my head around how much effort that is. That’s a solid hour of about 5-6 miles of running, or about two hours of 15-18 mph cycling, every day for a month. I’m going to say that an hour of Krav Maga qualifies as “intensive kickboxing” which will burn about 800 calories an hour. All this means that weight loss is a lot of sweat. Stupid fucking not-cycling-all-summer.
Last week there was an article (which now requires registration, boo) in the Statesman about Lance training for the NYC marathon. The thing that struck me was during his informal time trial at the highschool, he ran a 4:51 mile. wow!
Where’s a person gotta go to learn Farsi in Austin?
And speaking of sweat, I really wish my apartment had access to a sauna. I think the Finns are onto something.
