not exactly a proud milestone, but...

I weighed myself this morning after the morning constitutional and discovered I was 289.4 pounds.

Sounds like a lot, right? It is. It means I'm enormous and have a long, long way to go before I'm more normally proportioned. But put this weight in perspective: when I came back from Korea, I was 297.3 pounds.

The first ten pounds of weight loss can generally be discounted as "water weight," i.e., the weight you lose from sweat, a decreasing ability to retain water as the body tightens up, etc. But an immodest part of me fancies that this weight loss-- not even eight pounds-- represents hard-won (or hard-lost, I suppose) poundage because it's taken over three weeks to reach this point.

I could be wrong, of course; this could simply be water weight. In fact, as my brother David jokingly pointed out, I could actually end up gaining weight during the walk. As other transcontinental walkers have noted, when you're walking from home to home or community to community, food is rarely a problem.

So for the moment, I seem to have pulled myself back from the cliff's edge of 300 pounds and have crossed from the 290s to the 280s. Here's hoping this continues into the 270s, the 260s, the 250s...

[NB: I'm fully aware that weight is neither the sole nor the most important metric by which to judge something like fitness. The best advice I've heard is to judge by two things: (1) the fit of your clothes, and (2) your resting (seated) heart rate. We might add blood pressure to that list. I have a friend from Nebraska who, as an accomplished runner back in high school, had a resting heart rate somewhere in the 50-beats-per-minute range. That's incredible to me.]


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