A nice walk and two cool things happened…

Yesterday was a 9.5 km day and I did very poorly. I decided to run 8:30 and walk 1:30. That will be my new Galloway type interval for LSD’s. I felt really weak and slow and yes, fat. I am *gak* counting calories! Like Lisa Lawrence, I don’t believe in diets, especially the fad ones. But having acknowledged (for over a year now) that I eat too much, AND, having just now given up on the idea that I can “exercise away the added calories”, I have decided to watch that I keep my daily caloric intake to between 2000-2500 calories. Preferably to below 2000 for a start. If you think that is high you are right but then again I was very often eating well over 3500 calories on a frequent basis which is easier than you think. Especially when you eat too much refined pasta and carbs. For the record, I average 195 pounds and have been that way for over a year.

Today was supposed to be a rest day so I decided to go out to the local bird sanctuary with my PDA GPS unit to map some waypoints for future runs. I wanted to know the exact distance. So I walked a huge loop probably 4 km or so with Marilyn. I haven’t plugged the waypoints into Google Earth yet to prove the distance.

During one pause while I was inputting a waypoint into my PDA, Marilyn spotted a strange object in the sky. I looked at it and it looked like a highly reflective spherical object at zenith, reflecting the sun which was low on the southern horizon. The time was approximately 1 PM. The object seemed very high and it was traveling slowly from north to south in a clear blue sky. When the object approached zenith, it traveled in a small circle about 10 or 20 times the diameter of the object itself, then headed slowly in an easterly direction. I said it was probably a weather balloon that was gaining altitude. The balloon was being pushed in a southerly direction by the winds at that altitude (I conjectured) but as it gained altitude it transitioned into another wind stream that was headed eastward hence the circle and subsequent change of direction to the east. It was pretty cool to look at, but no features other than a point of bright reflected sunlight could be observed.

An even cooler thing happened when we paused for another waypoint. We were in the pine trees on the trail and we were suddenly surrounded by a flock of chickadees. They were very curious and unafraid of us. Marilyn held her hands out and so did I and they actually landed on our hands, fingers, shoulders, even on my PDA which I was holding in my other hand. It was really cool to feel their little feet gripping my finger as they searched for food. They would hover just an inch away from landing on us and we could feel the wind and hear the noise of their flapping wings as they examined us from head to toe. It was so much fun that we decided to always bring some sunflower seeds for them next time. Unfortunately we had nothing to give them and they lost interest and moved on.

I run 5 km per day for the next three days starting tomorrow.