Climbing Mt. Everest

I gained a pound. Not sure why, but it happened. I'd like to say make up something like i"m probably building muscle or something like that, but it is probably not the case. But here is an analogy I heard that made sense.

People who climb large mountains may trip, or lose their footing, and go backwards a little bit. But they recover, and keep going. They don't slide all the way back to the bottom on purpose. If they would do that, then looking at the huge mountain from the bottom again would be too difficult.

So let's say that my journey is Mt. Everest which is 29,029 high. If you divide that by the number of pounds I need to lose then this last week I slipped 193.5 feet. That's unfortunate. Lost my footing or whatever.... But if I give up, like I always used to, I'm going to slip back the 6773.4 feet that I've already come. So I have to stay on track and keep climbing.

All of life is like this, isn't it? We want to make progress in some area, but the mountain is just so high to climb. Now, I'm not a mountain climber, but my guess is that the mental process in mountain climbing involves setting tiny reachable goals. One ledge at a time. Just need to make it to the next plateau, or that tree up there, or whatever. It would be impossible to focus only on the very top of the mountain which seems like an impossible undertaking. You gotta take small steps.

You may have noticed that I changed the blog title to Steps. Shrinking Slob was pretty negative -- supposed to be funny -- but I have discovered that this blog has become more about my body shrinking and more about the steps I've been taking to have the rest of me grow. The things I'm learning on this journey are so applicable to the rest of my life.

And today, even after I read the number on the scale, and shifted my weight a few times, stood on one foot, trying to get it to go down lower, I still did my workout, still drank my water.... Already had 4609 on the pedometer before my shower this morning.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Here is this weeks workout:

Bike warm up

Treadmill warm up

4.3 mph at 3.0 incline for 8 separate minutes, with a cool down between of 2 minutes

Treadmill cool down that includes 1 minute on each leg of side stepping at 1.0 mph (this may not seem hard but it is pretty fast when you're side stepping) and 45 seconds on each leg of lunges.

Bike cool down.

Mentally I enjoy this workout more than the last three weeks. My heart rate still gets to about 160 and my recovery is at 2.7 mph instead of 2.5. But I get more steps in and spend 32 minutes on the treadmill instead of 30. And I don't feel like I'm going to die. Which means that next week I can up my incline and/or speed.

If you're still reading this and haven't fallen asleep yet, I was thinking this morning of back in Luverne when I used to go to the pool and first started walking on the treadmill. I remember that those first few weeks my top speed was 2.3 mph. I laughed this morning thinking that now my recovery speed is 2.7.

One step at a time, one day at a time.