And the diet goes on...

Yep, still at it. 24 pounds down so far, and no huge bumps in the road. I did have a little bit of a setback with the sorority convention. Disney can bite me. No internet access or gym use without paying more than I was willing or able to shell out, and eating what they served us sent me way over my daily allowance. I gained three or four pounds back that weekend, but it's since come off again and I'm back on track.

The big news is that I've decided to train to walk a marathon. It wasn't my idea, but a couple of the girls from the nin forum weight loss group suggested we all get together for a marathon and after a little research I decided it would be a reasonable goal. And not the half-marathon, either. The whole 26.2 miles.

We've set our sites on New Orleans in February. I'm just finishing up my third week of training: three short walks during the week and a long walk on the weekend. So far, the short walks have been 3-4.5 miles, and the long walks have topped out at 6.

The first week fucking killed me. I walked the first three mile walk with Kourt -- not really pushing myself as hard as I could so I didn't leave her in the dust. My usual walking pace is just about 3 miles/hour (20 minutes for a mile, if the math is too hard for ya.) But I wanted to see how fast I could walk if I pushed hard, so the last mile I did in about 16 minutes.

The next morning I was really, really sore. But I didn't want my training schedule to get derailed just one day in. So I headed out for the second day and did the three miles at as fast a pace as my sore, fat legs would manage. I was totally exhausted, and I still had to go to work that night. By morning I wanted nothing more than to just go to bed and sleep off some of the soreness, but stupid me had picked up an afternoon shift at another store to get in some extra hours, so I barely got any sleep before having to stand at a cash register for yet another shift. I hurt so bad by that night that Kourt and I opted for a nice, leisurely 3-mile stroll at something like 3.5 miles/hour.

I started to wonder if I'd make it through even one week of the training program.

But by the weekend I had recovered, and did my 4.5 mile long walk with no trouble at all.

Since then it's gone well, except for last week's poorly-scheduled 6 mile long walk, which ended up getting pushed to Monday morning because of other conflicts. For some reason I thought 8:30 am would still give me pleasant temperatures to walk in. By the time I started mile number 4, the sun was pretty high in the sky, and the temperature was in the high 70s.

Oh, and I'd only brought one large bottle of water with me.

I don't get along well at all with sunlight. Or heat. The first three miles were cake, the last three were hell. But slight sunburn, borderline heat stroke, and very tired muscles didn't kill me, thanks to a quickly-administered bottle of gatorade and a few hours in the air conditioning.

So, anyway, so far so good, and I'm enjoying watching my measurements drop as I get toned up. Just 11 more pounds before I really start celebrating, 'cause that'll put me back at the weight I was before I opened the store.