June 17, 2007

I Would Walk (50 Miles)

As many of you know, I don't drive for a variety of reasons. I actually like the relaxing commute that I have now using the train and bus, and I've managed to get my one-way commute down to 65 minutes from end to end. It's still enough time for me to get a lot of reading done and some coding (although it's difficult to get myself into a C++ mindset and code for any significant portion of that trip, so it's usually C#/XNA work to tide me over).

But even so, there is still a significant amount of walking that is done on a daily basis. For the Hell of it, I've started tracking my distance over the last few weeks using a pedometer. Even though my average stride length when I'm walking my normal speed is about 36 inches, I've been using a 30 inch stride when doing my distance calculations to account for slower walking at times and "false steps."

Turns out that I walk approximately fifty miles a week. During the week I average about six miles a day, and about ten miles a day on the weekends.

The last time I did this experiment was back in Utah and at the time I was only walking about forty miles a week. That was partly because I didn't have as far to walk to board my mass transit options, partly because I had much more sedentary jobs, and partly because Layton was a significantly smaller city so I didn't have as far to walk when I needed to get to places.

As a quick side note, my blood sugar is (finally) close to under control. My morning blood sugar is still a little high (I'm averaging about 135 mg/dL) but my pre-meal glucose is around 100 mg/dL and my after-meal is between 130-140 mg/dL. That's even with a reduction in my glipizide from 7.5mg to 5mg. Next step will be to reduce my dose to 2.5mg and see if I can keep the sugar in check. If I can, there's a very good possibility that after my surgery at the end of August, my diabetes could go into remission and I may even be able to get off of the glipizide altogether. Here's hoping.

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