Today’s Start Walking blog:
Thursday, 15 June 2006: University Lake, & going for another 19,000-step day
Got in 18 minutes of dancing this morning, & on the way in by bus I did as I did Monday: I waited for the bus two bus stops beyond my normal bus stop, & got off at Lake Otis & Providence Drive (instead of Providence Hospital), which gave me a good bit of walking this morning. By the time I reached work, I’d accumulated 7,285 steps (including 2,358 from dancing), a respectable start for the day.
I plan to walk at lunchtime, & to walk all the way home from work (four miles) to bring my day total to 10,000 over baseline.
Later…
Today for lunch I walked to & around University Lake, which is south of the Alaska Pacific University campus off Bragaw. It’s been a long time since I’ve walked all the way around University Lake — perhaps as far back as 1997 or so, when I was in the MFA program here & was still fairly knew to learning about wild plants. The Municipality of Anchorage has a park around part of the lake, & a couple of years ago made it into one of the few places in Anchorage where dogs can run off leash, so of course I met a few dogs (with their people) on my progress around the lake, including two beautiful greyhounds whose owner adopted them after careers as racing dogs in Oregon. She allowed me to take a couple of pictures of them, too — I’ll add one to this blog after I download them from my camera. There were some Campfire kids learning water & boating safety, too, & later I saw a Campfire canoe being paddled across the lake.
I wound my way back through UAA student housing back to work, having accumulated another 6000+ steps, which is I think the most I’ve ever accrued in a lunch hour so far. I need only another 5,600 steps to reach my goal for today, & I wouldn’t need to walk all the way home to get that, but I think I’ll still do it. Then I’ll have that much less to do tomorrow, which I want to make the fourth of my “top four” days this week (today being the third) that I need to average out 10,000 over baseline.
Later yet…
I was delayed getting out of the office, & since we had plans tonight, I needed to be pretty timely getting home. Given I was ahead of the game, so to speak, I decided not to walk home all the way, but rather to take the bus as far as the first stop on Northern Lights past the Seward Highway & walk the rest of the way from there. I thought that would easily take care of the 5,600 steps I needed… but I was wrong! As I got closer to home, I realized I wouldn’t have enough, so I started doing a loose zigzag again, going through a neighborhood I’d never been through before (& spotting a richness of wild raspberry bushes that I must revisit when raspberries come out later this summer!), & eventually got home a couple hundred steps over. Then we drove downtown to our event (a showing at the Anchorage Museum of a film about toxic waste from computers & other electronic equipment); walking between our car & the museum a block away added to my total. So did doing some cleaning once we got back home again.
Day total: 20,696 steps.
