weight for it

Well, I'd lost another pound when I weighed myself this last weekend.

I have to confess I'm a little disappointed with that, but also not entirely surprised. See, having now established that to get an at least vaguely accurate reading from my pedometer I need to put it in my breast pocket, I've had something of a shock about my walking. Previously I thought I was doing okay, but the pedo has revealed that I must actually have been falling some way short.

I therefore decided I was going to try getting up even earlier and going for a longish walk first thing, rather than the shortish stroll I've been doing. This did not work well.

The real problem is my totally weird behaviour when it comes to going to work. I mean, I don't officially start work until 9am, but I generally get to work at about 8am. And I honestly don't really know why.

Part of it may be that I'm a bit of a morning person. I like being up before everyone else. One of the things I like about my morning walk is that most of the rest of the world (as it were) is still sleeping.

Part of it is traffic. The route I use to work involves a roundabout that causes a lot of delay. Generally speaking, during term time, if I get there after about 7:45 it will add at least 15 minutes to my journey time. Now considering my journey to work is about 30 minutes on a morning, you can see how that's nor much fun.

Also, I have a particular loathing for sitting in traffic jams. I will actively seek out and use alternative routes even if they are much longer if it means I can avoid sitting in a jam. Even if the extent that the extra time taken on the alternate route might outweigh the time spent in the jam.

It's because it feels like utterly wasted time.

Another part of it is that it's part of my campaign to get RED to shift to flexible working. Id' love to be able to go home at 5 instead of 5:30. Or to save up and toddle home at 3:30 on a Friday. Or even take an extra day off.

But I don't think these really explain it. I think the real explanation is that I established the time I get up when I last worked at dstl (where they do have flexi) and I have simply stuck with it ever since. In other words, it's a routine I've now established and for me that's difficult to alter.

So when I started on the whole walking thing, I started getting up at 6:30, rather than my usual 6:45. The idea was that this would let me go for a 15 minute walk and still maintain the same basic schedule in the morning. And it worked well, but then I discovered the fact that my pedo readings were way off, so I started thinking about how I could squeeze in extra walking.

And the answer I came up with was to get up at 6:15 and go for a longer walk - to do my Saturday and Sunday walk. That way I'd easily bump up the mileage. Only there's a big problem - I just can't get up at 6:15 and go for a long walk like that. It's a real struggle, so all I end up doing is the same short walk and then getting into work even earlier!

Of course, I know the real answer. The real answer is to add an extra walk to when I get home. Problem there has been that all this fannying around with boxes and decorating my room and e-bay rubbish has meant that I'd just not had the time to do that.

I guess after my holiday when all will hopefully be sorted I can do a more sensible, planned routine and do the walk after work.

Anyway, last week I struggled to get even my minimum amount of walking in. I've been making so many trips to the post office to post e-bay stuff and spending the evenings parcelling it all up that I couldn't really do as much walking as I'd have hoped, despite the whole attempt at getting up even earlier.

It also didn't help that I wasn't quite as strict with the diet as I had been. I mean, I didn't completely fall off the proverbial wagon, but there were certainly a couple of days of non-plan eating.

I could blame this all on the horrible disruption I've been experiencing as part of the room redecorating sage, but the truth is I should be working around that.