Slurping the dribble with dav3

I stumbled and fell, and now I have picked myself back up again. My weightloss was going well, and when I peaked at around 12kg I simply stopped. Initially it was the walking that stopped, then it was the diet that went out the window.

But now I am back on the band wagon. Starting off simple, no carbs in the evening, bringing back my protein shakes, and riding my new bike!!!

In this map, the blue line is the walk to the Clarence St Cyclery to pickup my the bike in the previous post. The green line is the ride I went on. Without zooming in, you can't tell that the ride around centennial park consisted of 2½ laps! The whole ride was spot on 30km.

Obviously with this posting, it can be inferred that I am still alive. That IS the case, I AM! But I am soooo STUFFED!!  read more »...

I have not done any exercise or walking for a long time, over 2 weeks (there was one night I did a small amount of gym work, but I wasn't feeling well, so I bugged out early...)

Mum was in town, so I took an early mark from work and we went out to dinner in Surrey Hills. And on the way back I thought I would take her for a short jaunt around Central. All up, not quite 6km.

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I only went for a short walk to Moore Park (2.2km) today because I wanted to see what was out there in LCD land. So I paid a visit to Bing Lee, Dick Smith PowerHouse and Harvey Norman... I think I have found the one I will buy, it's the Samsung "SyncMaster 245B", features a resolution of 1920x1200 and a 5ms refresh. It only has DVI and VGA inputs (why is it so hard to find dual DVI inputs?). So, I have contacted my bank and I am upping the limit on my credit card - Australians LOVE credit...

Well, I do :-)

All 24" varieties were very expensive at these stores, the cheapest of which was around $750. The Samsung though was $999. A little out of my price range. Although a quick search on StaticIce (link) found many places selling these little BIG beauties from as low as $530...

One place would even sell them from little more than $500 if purchased with a new system. I don't need a new system... Or do I??

That's almost 2 for the price of 1! Maybe I should buy 2 :-)

The Giant Staircase

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This was a pretty good day. I actually started off with a train trip to Bondi to have some breakfast, then back home to get changed and then met 2 friends at Central railway Station.

We caught the 9.55am train to Katoomba and another mate jumped on at Strathfield. The only thing wrong with the whole day was the fact the train trip was 2 hours each way. The pain of the train strip was removed with the quality of company on the day.

When we got to Katoomba we decided to have lunch at a Coffee shop we found on the way to Scenic World. We downed that and we were on our way.

Once there, although the board only lists full return prices, we found that if you ask, you can by one-way train tickets to get down the mountain. This cost us $10 neat. A bottle of water for the trip and we were on our way.

The whole walk itself wasn't too bad, quite easy and recommended for anyone. However the stairs at the end were a killer. I had to stop a few times, but once I finally got to the top it was really easy. I recovered well and started jogging to the end point (echo point). I think the stairs took about 30 minutes (for me) and the whole walk was not much more than an hour. An hour and a half tops.

The walk back to the station wasn't that hard, but it was all uphill. We didn't have long to wait for the train, and before we knew it, we were all back home.

There's another group of us planning to do a similar walk in a few weeks. This one is going to involve an area known as the ruined castle. It's visible from echo point and pretty much just involves walking in the other direction. This walk will also finish off with the Gian Staircase.

Only a short walk today, warming up for tomorrow and getting some computer parts to build a new PC.

I walked all the way to the shop (<2km) and had originally planned to grab a cab home since I had bought a whole tower in the process. But it was a nice day, the gear wasn't that heavy and so I walked back too.

I was to have lunch/coffee with a friend today, but unfortunately they had had a rather big night the night before and I only found out once I had started my route out today (hence the awkward shape of the altered route mid-stream), which assisted in making this walk totaling almost 20km!

Everything still worked out well though, I did the Bondi stretch (an extended 10km jaunt) in exactly 90 minutes. The first and last 30minutes were running/jogging/shuffling, with half hour of walking in the guts. As you can calculate, I do not run very fast. In fact the Ho Chi Minh shuffle (as I call it) is marginally faster than walking. I do find it much easier than running which just seems to hurt too much.

That accounts for the red part of the journey. The green was very much a slow walk and enjoying the sites. I have never done this walk before so I was just cruising having a good ole gander as I wandered the shoreline. A very pleasant walk and a beautiful day for it too.

clicking this photo takes you to a flickr photo-set of the day

The day went well, I still caught up with my friend who gave me several glasses of water - much needed. I was pretty much going to walk from there and go on home, but once I realised how close I was to Cogee and decided that if I was this close, I had to finish the walk off there. Once there, I decided my feet had certainly had enough. So I caught the bus back towards home and then did a little shopping on the last little bit of green you see in the map.

WHAT A DAY!

Had Subway for lunch with two mates, and decided to go for a short walk to the Chinese Gardens at Tumbalong Park. After devouring a full foot-long sub I decided a longer walk was necessary. As you can see by the map, it was no short walk. All told it was over 15km, although the last few were a very slow walk - my feet were killing me.

No running today, just a walk. Although I did find a VERY good workout at a set of stairs I found along the route (picture below - click to make full size). These things nearly killed me...

109 steps from top to bottom (or since I was at the bottom, we'll say from bottom to top). And I did them, not only once, not twice... Not even three or four times. I did these stupid things FIVE times. It did near kill me and on the last lap up to the top I honestly thought my legs were about to fall off. It was VERY hard.

Every time I got to the top I said to myself, "Man, that was good, I should do it again... but I won't." And then when i got to the bottom I thought, "that wasn't so bad, let's go!" and off I'd go again.