Off to reasonably good start

Since my last post, with all my bad news and the start of a plan to step up my exercise to knock off pounds instead of taking awful drugs, I have managed to get going. I wasn’t sure what the effect on knee pain an increased workout load would have so I have been building up slowing, while adding bike, subtracting a bit on elliptical. So as of last post I had a whopping 4.0 miles (first day) and now it’s up to 96.2.

Meanwhile my virtual hike is progressing slowly, but I have made it to another milestone, passing through the town of Malvern. This is one of the best stops along with Wabash Trace. There is an old depot right on the trail and a decent restaurant downtown. Here’s an overhead to provide the context:

And here’s a look at the depot from the streetview:

I actually have a bit of history with that depot. One time while doing real hike on the trail I stopped and rested up a bit before driving back to Omaha. About half an hour later, already back in Nebraska on I-80 I realized I didn’t have my handheld GPS (Garmin eTrek). I hustled through first exit, looped through a fast food place at breakneck speed, back through the cloverleaf and now headed back to Iowa. I really pushed the speed a bit, over as much as I dared to still maybe avoid ticket (there is a lot of speeding on that stretch, I usually don’t). Every moment as I’m seemingly crawling back to Malvern I figure there is no chance I’ll find my GPSr. So I pull in the parking lot you see in the photo and there is a guy just getting in his car. I ask him if there is any chance he’d seen my GPSr. In fact he had it, plus some story he was going to turn it in somewhere (possibly true, but I would not have known to go claim it there). So I got it back. Literally if I had been 30 seconds later getting there I would have lost it, so every bit of the haste I put into the drive was worth (plus no actual danger to anyone and no tickets).

And here’s the trail crossing the main street of Malvern, just south of the town center

So now, even with only every other day hiking segments and now even lower distance I have managed to cover this since my first post about starting a new virtual hike:

It looks a little more impressive than it is, as indicated by the entire distance I’ve covered in 33 hiking segments can be covered on a bike in less than two hours.

My second Malvern story is that back when I seriously was training with anticipation of walking the Camino I used Malvern as a test of my endurance. I asked my wife to drop me off, 18 hiking miles south of Malvern and she’d do some things while I walked to Malvern to then meet up and have dinner at the cafe there, basically simulating a single typical day on the Camino. While I’ve done lots of hiking and backpacking, nonetheless 18 miles non-stop was my longest. So as I crossed the street (in photo above) and went off the trail to walk up to the restaurant I was feeling quite satisfied. I knew I could have gone somewhat further (maybe another hour) before beginning to really tire, so, IOW, I had achieved the daily pace of the Camino. But, of course, back to back days like that and in fact six weeks of day after is a whole different story.

So speaking of biking, in just 12 days and 7.12 hours elapsed time, I have managed to do 96 miles, which I think is more than the entire Wabash Trace. Obviously piling up miles on a bike is a lot easier than on an elliptical, but also, at present, I am spending about 3X as much time (per day) AND nearly every day (only occasional planned rest days). So I’m chugging along and obviously need some goal, some kind of virtual ride to use as my progress measurement and also incentive.

In my present binge, reported here about 9-11 years ago, I had multiple virtual rides, but I wanted something different. Also the mapping tool I used then I don’t have so I have to use Google Maps, which are not a very good replacement. So at first I though I’d do a virtual RAGBRAI, a well known multiday ride across Iowa, but: a) I couldn’t find a decent GPS track, b) even if I had a track I don’t have a tool to use it, and, c) RAGBRAI really isn’t that long (around 500 miles, not that ambitious for months of basement exercise). So I just happened to notice that Google can generate a route for a bicycle (I have been using that feature for walking, where Google will follow the Trace, not the roads as it would for a car route). It’s kinda bizarre what route it choses (though some makes sense, as it did use of the bike trails (also reported in this blog years ago) to get out of town.

So I have to plot segments (due to limit in number of via points in a route) and do those with manual record keeping, but alas it appears the route, with my forcing as near borders as feasible, Google picks all the way around Nebraska is about 1400 miles. Now that, at least, is probably enough to keep me going for at least 4 months and I hope I will be fully into weight loss regime by then to.

So, IOW, now I have two virtual routes going, walking the Wabash Trace, riding around the perimeter of Nebraska (as a reference I’m just north of Decatur now getting near South Sioux City (mostly north from Omaha) and once there turning west to the long ride out to the Panhandle, first via Ponca. Once I get about 200 miles or so, I’ll post a route picture here.

(Actually I’ve just done the work as an experiment, so I’ll post a bit here and explain)

Each of those white dots is a destination and this route contains the maximum number Google allows (and to get even this much I had to delete a couple of intermediate destinations). I have to put in those white dots (almost exactly where they are) or else Google chooses some “better” route, which it might be, but since the virtual ride I want would be as close to the border as possible I have to force Google to go where I want, not its “better” route. When I say as close as possible, I will, however stick at least with highways and not the gravel section line roads because that would be a nightmare of placing white dots.

So, IOW, I will not be able to generate a route that does go all the way around, so I’ll have to post my progress in segments.

Lots of insane TMI details, but all this is to keep me motivated and going. I’d much prefer to be doing a real route, but this kind of virtual stuff is my only option.

Speaking of weight, I only have a little detail (any reader familiar with my numerous posts a decade ago knows how much detail I can do about that!). It appears I’ve lost 6lbs in less than two weeks. Now: a) that’s not the number (you can find lots of posts I did on research about “scale noise”, i.e. how much error there is in a single weighing, even on a good electronic scale), and, b) most of this is probably due to the Lasix which I’m taking in fairly large doses to get rid of edema in my legs (with some success). The real ordeal of weight loss starts later.

And closing this post on that point: 1) my insurance has denied the Ozempic prescription (while I qualify on some grounds, not enough), which isn’t too unexpected since right now too many people are trying to get this very expensive med just for casual weight loss to fit in some clothes, not as medical necessity, so insurance is getting restrictive, and, 2) my cardiologist, yesterday, did a fair amount of debunking of the “panic” my other docs (part of the diabetes lobby) tried to put in me. I am gambling with my life to “reject” the conventional wisdom, but the main way (disputed in science literature) some blood glucose can kill me is through destroying my heart and I think it’s a fairly safe bet to trust a cardiologist on that point (still worried about going blind, but I’m going to get that checked to). So, for the moment any aggression and full diet plan is still on hold, but that will have to come.

I’m relieved I’ve been able to bump up exercise without too much knee pain, but I am way way lower intensity (as well as duration, which I will build up) compared to 11 years ago, so the results I had then are an impossible goal, but I still can have some hope I can make some progress with the same, mostly-not-meds, adjustment. Stay tuned to see if I success (which I say because that puts pressure on me to succeed so I won’t be embarrassed reporting failure).

p.s. I was really tempted to skip my miles today, but doing posts works, so I pushed on through despite some serious fatigue.

At it again, deja vu all over again

Well, the last few weeks have sucked and so now I have to restart something I started about 11 years ago. First a “routine” visit to cardiologist but with severe lower extremity swelling which I thought was merely a side-effect of one of his BP meds. Fine, he agreed, and changed meds. Then an unexpected visit to ER, for an embarrassing but totally first time ever problem for me, quickly corrected with with some new side-effects. Then while BP dropped due to new med, swelling only slightly improved and began to be painful and with a rash, so off to regular doc for that, except he was out, so met with nurse practitioner, who read me a lot of riot act on lots of health issues, but mostly order a battery of tests.

In my reference to history, quickly it’s about weight, which was 247, eventually with lots of posts and work, down to 179, which was suggested as too low and also had the side effect of triggering my first deadly diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, which led to lots of gloomy posts, but also suspending my weight loss discipline. Add about a zillion things on top of that (plus the MDS diagnosis went away) I’ve done exactly what I swore not to do, which is regain all the weight, and, unfortunately more.

What triggered my drastic weight loss effort before was a different doc nagging me about A1C levels, that eventually after considerable research I decided mine was in a grey zone of problematic interpolations from actual data BUT I did decide to go for life style changes to at least prevent it from getting worse and unambiguously bad, which, unfortunately, it now is. So no more denial, just deciding how I’m going to manage something that unchecked will kill me (not exactly clear how or when), but managed will make life miserable and remove almost all joy and maybe just kill me a little later (unclear, the treatment may be as bad, in terms of outcome, as the disease).

So, now the question is simple – can I do it again?

Unfortunately my answer is it’s unlikely since I’m now 11 years older and at a stage in life where vigorous exercise (1000 cal/day level) is unlikely for anyone. But now, unlike 11 years ago I have moderate arthritis so hours a day on exercise equipment is not going to be very likely and quite possibly, esp. for at least the three years the weight loss will take, impossible. So, as I dreaded as I knew I should have arrested my breakdown of discipline and steady line by to obesity, at this age it is going to be almost entirely calorie reduction with maybe some increased calorie burning.

So here’s my historical post when I started my program before. While my first post was 25Nov2012, I was reporting on my first six weeks of the program, where I’d dropped from 247 to 235. So today, as I start doing something (possible med mediated, given my current life expectancy is only in the range where the meds will also kill me, I may be more willing, or have no choice, but to go the med route this time). So I start at 259.8. It’s unlikely I’ll drop 12lbs in my first six weeks of this new effort and just even be down to my starting point of the early effort, but at least some of my current weight is swelling and maybe the Lasix I just started will give me a quick start.

Now why am I bringing all this up?

Not for any sympathy or anything, but actually just to commit myself, in a public way (but not known to anyone who directly knows me) that I’m going to do it again. I lost (counting some undocumented initial guessed amount) 80lbs before, so I can do half that, 40 again, which might put me back in ambiguous zone which I might choose to live with, since as far as I’m concerned, all of this is now how I choose to manage my end of life, stretched a little more but with no reason to be living due to such a diminished life, or compressed a bit, get it over with but have a little bit of fun in the time left. Not sure how I feel about that yet.

BUT, the optimistic case is I can basically reduce weight again (since really, that’s all this disease is all about, A1C and “diabetes” is just another name for obesity and its side-effects) and end up with normal life expectancy (not that long, but it’s more how I die than when I die that concerns me).

So by talking about all this, talking about weight with my endless charts and graphs and analysis, talking about exercise with all the virtual goals (now with purpose) to keep me going, will be critical. If I fail, I have to admit failure publicly (here) and I will be very reluctant to do that.

So therefore I’m selfishly writing this, and future posts, to motivate myself.

From the last time, I already have all the tags I need:
aging, despair, exercise, nutrition, walking, weight

And I’ll reuse my ‘the end’ category, because this time it really is, just not as well-defined as when I used this for MDS.

And just another irony in all this: 1) due to unexpected death of my sister, then brother-in-law, I am inheriting sufficient funds to provide for my likely life expectancy, even including the last time with the enormous expense of nursing home (have gone through that with others, also hospice – I’m more experienced with death than I might have expected), and, 2) a major negative drain, both emotionally and financially that sometimes made me wish I were dead has unexpectedly disappeared, a real irony in that part of what motivated me to continue living was to spend my assets and leave nothing to that person, but now the irony is I’ll most likely die before going broke (my great fear for decades) and thus leave my remainder to absolutely no one I know since my direct family is all gone now. Strange twist, maybe some kind of karma, now with almost certain economic security, I either won’t spend it (the discipline I’ll have to have takes away two big pleasures in life, food and drink, now it’s water and twigs and sprouts forever) or I’ll be dead before it’s gone.

Now I just hope my knees hold out.

Since I’d already begun some posts about a virtual hike, now I’m going to change that significantly, since I have to find exercise plan with far great calorie burn that I was doing, so now maybe it’s back to virtual Camino again (though from my last weight loss, even Camino is far too short to do enough calorie burn, so maybe it’s circumnavigate the lower 48 again (did that once with virtual biking).

So expect to get lots more “data” posts, since that is the medicine that is really going to work for me.

A vivid memory

Lately I’ve been immersed in death: handling the estate of my last immediate family member, losing my best friend, even though we’ve hardly spoken in a couple of years, and losing my wife’s son, who was the source of many trials and tribulations for me, but nonetheless I did not wish this for him. I can’t help thinking about him, just a few hours before his death he spoke to his mother, totally routine. Then all we know is he called 911 because he was having trouble breathing, but was able to dress, lock his apartment and go outside to wait for the ambulance. He died alone. And perhaps for a few moments before he lost consciousness he might have thought he was dying. He had claimed to have done suicide attempts (I doubted these) and he had had a serious illness and lengthy hospitalization where he was near death, but did he know this was it? And how did he feel? He had a troubled life, so was it relief it was over. When my mother was dying, at 101, it was hard to visit her because she always would say, over and over, “Why can’t I just die.”. I was with my father when he took his last breath – did that really mean anything (he was completely unconscious). I saw my sister for the last time when we both knew, as I had to leave, we’d never see each other before. And, then after initially being ashamed about attending a memorial for my best friend, I decided I would and then found myself in the ER when that was happening.

It’s all a lot.

But that’s not what this post is about, it’s just the backdrop of the mood I’m in.

Yesterday my wife went out to lunch with a friend, she’s been doing that a lot to ease some of her really intense pain, and she asked me if I’d seen the rain. I knew it had rained some but I didn’t see it. She and her friend had a good view, but they weren’t outside in the outdoor dining area she described.

Previously she had asked me what I wanted to do on my upcoming birthday, my last I’ll ever have that is the product of consecutive primes, e.g. 2×3=6, 3×5=15, 5×7=35, 7×11=77, a meaningless but strange coincidence. Somehow I had a thought I wanted to be far out of town, in some beautiful place.

So as she was talking about watching the rain while having lunch, the two thoughts gelled, and, bam, now I knew where I wanted to go for my birthday.

The place has both moved to a new location and has a new name.

It used to be called just Dakota Burgers and Buns and was listed as one of the 10 best burger places in the USA.

By ‘back then’ I mean about 11 years ago when I spent several weeks, by myself, camping and riding my mountain bike (later stolen by my now dead stepson). This trip was the culmination of several “escapes” from Omaha as I was not adjusting well to life here. First I literally ran away from “home” and ended up in Big Bend Texas. On the way back I took a wrong turn, maybe prophetically or unconsciously, in the direction of my real home in California, instead of going north. I got off the highway to turn around and stopped on a gravel road. It was quite cold (March) and very dark and I just looked at the sky and smoked my last cigarettes (I had been required to quit smoking at part of recent marriage and moving to Omaha, but I was cheating). I just kept mulling over in my mind, North or West, North or West. My life in California was over, so the only “home” I could have was now North, so that’s what I eventually did.

But I realized that one reason I had gone nuts in Omaha was not my new circumstances or the place, but simply that unlike in California I stayed indoors all the time. In California I’d had a very active outdoor lifestyle. If I got sick of town it was a short drive (even just a walk) to someplace away for town. In Omaha, it’s was a full day’s drive just to get beyond cornfields and see anything approximating hills or forest.

So I realized my malaise in Omaha was partly just cabin fever and so I started finding excuses to get out more. As my wife hated camping I now had the excuse to go by myself (letting me indulge my guilty pleasure of smoking, but also staying up late as I’d just gotten my first laptop (to do navigation) and so I could write, much as I’m doing now, until I was exhausted – my life was my own with minimal compromises to anyone else’s schedule or agenda).

So the next trip was a short hop to a state park, pretty blah. Then a much longer drive to a state park almost as far as I could go and still be in Nebraska, but now with my new mountain bike (I was a good skinny tire rider and totally incompetent MTB rider). Then was OK, but still not enough, plus it was the first time I had fun (before starting geodashing) wandering around in nowhere with my GPS (a very early version when few people, anywhere, had car GPS). So I learned of the Michelson Trail in South Dakota and that became my next plan.

And so that lead me to Custer South Dakota, the location of the burger place. For a few days I stayed in a campground within the Custer State Park, but then happened to discover the more primitive National Forest Campground (even closer to the town of Custer) Bismark Lake, so I moved. The last night in Custer State Park a ferocious storm broke out, taking down the payphone just as I was calling, and all of us in tents were encouraged to go in the bathroom to have a roof. A little excitement. Oh, and a forest fire just where I’d been riding my bike.

So now I’m going into Custer almost every day to get ice and then I decided it was more fun to eat in restaurants, so I went to this place:

which was Dakota Burgers and Buns back in those days. Even then the place was well known and busy so there was no place to sit inside. I’d actually gone to that convenience store (in the picture) to get ice for my bourbon fueled late night writing and decided to stop. But there was no place to sit inside. I could get a ToGo order but didn’t feel like eating it in the car, and I noticed the small outdoor patio (to the right, as you can see in the photo). Due to the rain no one else was there and there was one table with an umbrella providing enough shelter I could eat there. It was one of those strange rainstorms, common in California, but rare here, where it´s blue sky above yet steady rain falling.

I managed to (mostly) stay dry and enjoy eating a very good burger and in fact having a very good day.

Someone once asked me, have you ever had any days that were purely delightful and pure joy. I had to think hard and could really only think of one. While I have a tendency to be down and negative I’m neither depressed or even just gloomy all the time. But I do think anhedonia is a fairly good fit.

But that day, especially in hindsight now, was a good day.

So when my wife evoked the image of eating outside in the rain and at the same time I’m thinking of someplace I’d really like to eat,

Burgers and Buns

But I also realized, it’s not just that the restaurant has moved its location (the funky one above was better) but that it’s 11 years later and a lot more things have changed and so this is another “You can’t go home again” thing.

IOW, my experience on that day, eating that burger in the rain, was unique and not just a particular restaurant, or a particular town, but the totality of where I was at – lost and unhappy in a place I where I didn’t want to live, escaping as best I could to the kind of natural environment (mountains and forests) that did energize me and then escaping sleeping on the ground and eating warmed up canned food and having a pleasant meal.

It is an experience I can’t recreate. It only lives in my memory.

Will I think of this when I’m dying? Which I now feel is not very far away. And how will I face that, my last “change” in life?

I seriously doubt I will accumulate any more “good day” memories, so the couple I have will be all I get in my lifetime. And perhaps that’s saddest of all.

Still plodding along

I know you love my posts about my virtual hikes, so here’s another one. But there is a little personal news too.

Doing this virtual hike thing, for me, is a strong incentive to keep moving and I need that now. I took a break of nearly month with just a few minor things, like: 1) the unexpected surprise death of my stepson, the reason for me originally starting this blog, 2) a rush to Ohio to do some estate activities that required in person activity, and, 3) my own illness (too embarrassing to mention) that landed me in the ER for the first time in my life.

Yes, I think that’s adequate amount of excuse for slacking off and not doing my daily exercise. In addition to the ER visit, a different health scare had me at my cardiologist for, at least, new meds (to try to reduce the serious swelling I have in feet, legs – an impediment to exercise). And I haven’t gotten to ortho guy for a steroid injection in the knew for modest pain.

So a big pile of reasons to stop exercising, but while it was super important years ago as chronicled by posts then, it’s getting to be a matter of survival.

The problem is, of course, when you stop exercise, you lose a lot of muscle tone, esp. when you’re also approaching 77 in 17 more days. So you need to get going again to regain that loss, but of course it’s hard. Plus, as a reluctant admission to health issues, I’m on beta blockers which also work against strenuous exercise.

Everything conspires to turn me into a fully couch potato.

So having some sort of goal, no longer something grand like walking the Camino, but an age- and condition-appropriate goal is a good thing, the counterbalance to apathy and laziness.

So my virtual hike may look super boring, but I’m still moving.

And learning a few issues with using Google Maps directions to convert linear distance accumulated on exercise equipment (now just elliptical since my ortho guy doesn’t want me doing hills on my treadmill as was my favorite before) into locations along a trail. Google knows the Wabash Trace Trail in Iowa, but however it codes the data for it has a glitch or two:

That’s the route it thinks one has to walk to cross that road, when you can clearly see the trail just crosses the road. So I had to break the plotting of my distance into a second segment.

This road intersection is just east of the Mineola Trail Head and here the trail is heading to Silver City. I’ve done this in real life and it’s one of the more boring segments of the trail, but look at the entire path of the Camino de Santiago and you’ll see plenty of boring parts there. Walks are what they are. Even a wilderness trail like the Appalachian is known as the green tunnel for its days of walking through a cut through dense forest.

So after my suspension of activity I got moving again, just past this road intersection and so recently passed this spot (from the Google Street View):

This is a small park in the small town of Silver City with the “trail” (here paved and better for bikes than walking) headed back to the northwest toward Mineola. It’s a little hard to see in this image (I wanted the wide scale for context) but there is a nice little gazebo there where I’ve stopped numerous times doing this trail for real.

So now I’m plodding along on another boring stretch which has as its next interesting point the trailhead in Malvern. Back in my real walking days that would have been about three hours for me. Continuing on the trail past Malvern was my longest single walk on the trail, about 15 miles (without any significant stops) when I was at my peak where I was looking to see if I’d worked my way up to the 18-22 miles per day the Camino requires.

That’s a far cry from my mileage on the elliptical (which measured just in miles the equivalent workout on flat treadmill walk is about 2.5X). But by statistical pace I’m just crawling alone.

But I’m moving. And if I’m moving I ain’t dead yet.

I wish them both the worst

Since this post is about ruthless and greedy billionaires I think I can suspend my normal civility and make mean-spirited comments.

As Elon Musk continues to destroy Twitter (good riddance on both counts) Zuck swoops in like a hungry hyena to feast on the remains by finally using the monopoly position of Meta to strike while Elon commits another self-inflicted error. I wish Zuck well (good, kill the other bad guy) and ill-will (I hope soon Meta will meet the same fate).

I think these two people are evil. They are both psychopaths who exploit others. They are so ridiculously rich now more money is meaningless, it’s just the power and control they can exert over others. Only Trump and Putin are more evil than these twin demons.

But beyond any personal animosity I might felt (and I know neither and am nothing to them) I really do think we’ve demonstrated that social media is and is increasingly one of the worst things we ever invented.

I spent my life in tech, often at the cutting edge in new software, and I was a true believer, just as the social media groupies are today. But other than maybe being connected to weapons I don’t anything I ever did had the potential to harm real people. And nothing I did could have ever even slightly impacted such a huge number.

To think of children, already insecure, being bullied into suicide. To think of other children, lost except for a glowing screen, to then be pushed into mass murder. Social media is the technical means to allow other humans, hiding behind their keyboard and screen, to do unimaginably awful things, something even bullies would not do in person.

The NRA loves to claim it’s not the gun that kills, but it is. Whatever a gun, esp. a mass slaughter weapon, a deranged person might be able to hurt a few, maybe even kill. But to create a technology that makes slaughter not just easy, but in some fantasy way appealing, means that technology and its inventors are the true killers. The mass shooter or the online bully is just inherently part of that technology. It may be hard to think of a computer and some optical fiber and some routers to be evil, and as is so true of other technologies, they are dual use for good and evil, these technological means in the hands of people like Musk and Zuck are horrible.

We think nuclear weapons are the worst and in sheer number of causalities in a short time they still are. And many of their inventors, who acted in a time of war and out of patriotism came to regret their contribution. But now we make these new killers into heroes and shower them with unbelievable wealth as they go about their bloody work. They never count the bodies, only the dollars.

I don’t give a shit about anything good that comes out of either Twitter or Meta – that’s a accident, a side-effect. The primary purpose of these things is maximizing wealth and power for a few and creating carnage for the many.

So I hope they both destroy each other and somehow we learn to abolish, or at least control, the weapons of mass destruction they created.

Surprisingly interesting

Well we’ve settled down after about 700 miles of driving on a three day trip. We went to a fairly unlikely travel destination, Hutchinson Kansas. Dayo likes a particular store in Wichita so we’ve visited there a number of times, a fairly easy drive from Omaha. But once we learned nearby Hutchinson has an attraction, but when we planned to visit it was closed for renovation. Meanwhile in planning this trip to try again we learned of another attraction.

So what are these great tourist attractions?

First is the Strataca Underground Salt Museum. The museum is a small, now inactive, portion of a much larger active salt mine (yes, doesn’t that song come to mind). From the main building you descend 650 feet to a very large area you mostly explore on foot in the constant 68F temporary. It’s well light but only enough so you still sense some “gloom” of being underground. The salt layer seems to be about 20-30 feet thick and has been removed, leaving behind pillars to hold up the ceiling. Mostly the museum itself consists of a variety of artifact exhibits and explanatory signage as it is a self-guiding tour with a few guides around to ask directions or questions. At the end of the walking tour there is a 15 minute ride on one of the original trains that gives a better sense of the mine itself, esp. how dark it is. You exit the ride near some exhibits of movie paraphernalia which is fitting because part of the mine is now used for archival storage of records and especially some of the original film of movies.

We had this tour recommended to us and might not have found it without a personal recommendation but it was the most unusual part of the trip.

The second part is the better known Cosmosphere, which is near downtown. You can spot it with an actual Redstone and Titan rocket outside. The Cosmosphere has an almost bewildering collection of space artifacts, starting with the German V1 and V2 (actual captured rockets) through all the US manned space program, including the ill-fated Apollo 13 capsule. But surprisingly there is a lot of Russian stuff too. Unlike a couple of other better-known aerospace museums we’ve toured, the exhibits here are much more up-close-and-personal, yes, a few large and impressive vehicles (an SR71 is always cool) but mostly actual stuff the humans used in their missions and a great deal of detail about missions. It was way more than we expected and after a while it became overwhelming. In fact if you’re a serious space buff you should plan two days to really have a chance to see everything.

Even though it was full summer travel season and both attractions were well attended, parking was easy and neither was so crowded as to be unpleasantly jammed or noisy.

And, third, fortunately, the Cosmosphere is near the downtown location of Salt City Brewing, where we did our usual thing of trying some flights and then our favorites, plus some really good nachos. But coincidence the brewer came out and sat down with us and chatted for quite a while about the beers, but mainly how he’d gotten involved and his philosophy of running the place. It was surprising that several of local people we had sufficient conversation that they all loved being in Hutchinson; one had even gone off to college in nearby Wichita and found it too large and returned to Hutchinson.

I have some dim connection in that my parents, in the early days of their marriage and where the only job my petroleum engineer dad could find was actual oilfield work and so they moved from town to town following whatever projects were under way and so briefly lived in Hutchinson. Of course this is then one of those reminders that once people are dead you don’t get to ask them any questions about when and why they did something, so my advice to anyone these days is to listen to all those stories of family members because some day you’ll never be able to learn them.

The new car performed well but much of the driving was at 75mph so the gas mileage was not great. Hybrids don’t have much effect at steady high speed especially when the aerodynamics is that of a bulky SUV (instead of the low drag coefficient of a Prius type vehicle). So I estimated we only saved about $20 in gas versus our previous gasoline-only vehicle. And a PHEV would have only helped with the driving around Hutchinson except that it wasn’t clear where we could have charged it. And I wouldn’t have wanted to waste 2-4 hours in 100+F weather sitting at chargers. I did get more opportunity to try some of the self-driving features and while they worked the car doesn’t drive itself the way a competent human driver would. I actually think if it were more autonomous it would be more dangerous. While our car has radar (a huge flaw, IMO, that Tesla doesn’t have that) nonetheless it’s road following is mostly based on cameras and while we were on generally good road, either construction or poorly painted (or even absent) lane markings caused the car to sometimes veer off in the wrong direction. In one place the orange cone lane separators (for several miles of construction) had been placed by somebody seriously drunk or hungover and were all over the place and required quite a bit of active dodging them; I would not have wanted the car to try that on its own.

So we tried the best rated restaurants, both fairly mediocre and actually had our best meal when we got back to Omaha and didn’t feel like cooking, so we tried a new (for us) place a bit further out west than we usually go. Everything was fine when we got back and all in all this was short enough distance to not be overly tired. And the AC in the new car worked quite well (plus then the great 68F in the mine) we didn’t really notice the 103F (worst we saw) outside temps, but it was quite warm.

During the trip we learned the house within my nightmare estate I’m handling seems to have been sold so soon we’ll be on our way to Ohio, again (I’ll be happy never to see Lima ever again), but we’re not going to have a proper vacation during the summer travel season, so hopefully we can have something more interesting in the fall.

What is this place? Goals Work.

A few days I posted a picture that I said I’d explain in the future. Well, the future is now and here’s the picture again:

Well, you can see it’s a wooden bridge over ???, with a gravel (actually crushed limestone) path headed off in the direction of a small town. Got it yet? Well, here’s a Google Street View of that bridge from a road that is just off the right (south) of the picture above:

Got it, yet? Well, it’s a creek and the bridge is clearly old and probably wouldn’t work too well for its original purpose which is to support a train, now gone. So this is actually the Wabash Trace Trail, a rails-to-trails conversion, just a short distance west of the town of Mineola, which by the way, is the location of my famous place I added to Google Maps, as I recently described. That place has had over 53000 views which is certainly more than this post will get.

Now before reaching this bridge, yesterday I passed another location that I like, seen in the picture below:

Neither of these photos may look like much, compared to spectacular scenery of National Parks, or, for that matter, about anywhere in California, but when you live in boring corn country you have to consume whatever semi-wild spot you can find. This particular spot, about 0.7 mile from the bridge has a nice bench and a gap in the trees (visible in the satphoto) to see the view, basically of the Keg Creek watershed.

Keg Creek is hardly a major waterway but it does start a ways north of this spot, up near Harlan Iowa (where two unnamed creeks join.) It then flows southwest to Glenwood Iowa where once upon a time a nice local brewery stood. The brewery, Keg Creek, naturally still exists but due to its success moved to a larger location no longer right near the creek.

You can see from the image below, a terrain map from Google Maps (with highly exaggerated terrain, yes there are some hills around but hardly what it seems:

The marker is the location of the photo and you can see the creek and its relatively flat watershed with some amount of hills around.

And cutting through the hills from just south of Council Bluffs, Iowa, is the Wabash Trail and the distance I’ve come, almost 50% more than my total distance when I made my first post. So while the total distance is an easy bike ride and about a standard Camino hiking day (going out and back, i.e. about 19 miles). Again, it ain’t much, but it’s what I’ve got and time to make the most of it.

Now since my stats are boring as toejam I’m only briefly touch on the second part of my title. Since getting persistent pains in my knee, plus side-effects of some new meds, my exercise quantity and thus fitness have dropped a lot. Once that happens it’s easy to just give up, which, of course, is exactly opposite of what I need. So after months of lackadaisical effort, and even that was hard to keep up, the other day I realized a goal is a goal and while once (as per early posts in this blog) they were very ambitious now something is better than nothing. So just the simple goal of doing a virtual walk on a trail that I have mostly done in real life is better than nothing.

And to that point I’ll show two quick graphs:

That’s my cumulative distance, where each bar is the day I do some distance on elliptical. Note that some of the gap is not laziness, but a trip to Ohio, but then the more intermittent and relatively infrequent days in the previous month were just lack of motivation. So it may make for boring posts, but publicly declaring my goal and announcing progress is good for me, rah-rah. You can note on this graph two things, a tiny bend above the regression line since my declaration of intent, and secondly just a bit more density, i.e. more frequent efforts, in fact the first consecutive three days since March. And while not on this graph this week’s result is the best since early March. That’s goals in action, at least as to how it motives me.

And finally, another graph I hope to present in the future with more clearcut progress

This is a bit too esoteric metric to explain, but it’s in my Excel record of all this (unfortunately, you’ll be seeing more in the future). The period between 80 and 120 was the doldrums I was in before adopting a new goal and now, hopefully to rise even further, the last bit shows the nice kind of upward trend..

While all this may seem boring to you, Dear Reader, let me propose though the article of faith (once badly misused by a terrible manager at HP) “things that get measured get better”. A goal is fine (train for Triathlon, train for century ride, train for the Camino) but you need something, almost every day to track and drive in the direction of progress. When I started swim training once when I brazenly decided I could do a triathlon I managed to swim the giant distance of 40 meters before being exhausted. But I kept stats (my first go at this, interesting on punch cards and analyzed by a batch program on a mainframe computer, no graphics) and found something, not quite daily, but certainly weekly I could make as a mini-goal and then beat (and then pat myself on the back for achieving the goal).

That’s my notion, a journal begins not just with the first step, but also each step along the way, measured to create a sense of progress and use the satisfaction of achieving mini-goals to keep on pounding until the big goal is met.

So I claim to you, if you’re trying to accomplish something, consider finding ways to keep records and analyze them with some metrics and then set mini-goals those metrics can measure and reward yourself with a bunch of little successes and I claim it will be a lot more likely you’ll have that big success you seek.

And just for fun, I used the map (below) in a previous post here and I’ll now use it for context.

That pink line is my GPS trace on the Wabash. I was doing individual day hikes and merging the data and this is as far as I got. This is a different mapping system (now lost) but to provide context for my current hike trace (above, now the Google map) I’m just at that first tiny little notch in the upper left corner. So you can see how far I have to go, at my current pace, to get down to the gap in my GPS trace near Imogene and it will be months before I get there and I’ll celebrate by hopefully getting out for some real walking, assuming it’s not too cold by then.

And my very last photo (actually my most viewed photo in Google Maps) is all the way down at the end of the pink line in the lower right and I’ll be happy to see that again. So join me here soon.

Starship Launch

Did you see it on Tuesday? Wasn’t it exciting? Going to Mars in just a few more weeks? And to the stars next year?

Oops, I don’t think there was a launch. What could have happened? The great earthly god of tech, Elon Musk, promised another launch in 1-2 months after he blew up his Starbase launch pad (by ignoring input from his team). I guess that didn’t happen. And, in fact, the webcam of Starbase shows it covered with construction equipment, not rockets.

This is far from the first outlandish predict Elon has made that didn’t happen. I’m sure all the owners of CyberTruck are enjoying their ride. And 300MPH capsules between LA and SF are a delight. Or those poor test subjects with wires in their brains just thinking their tweets, like Trump thinks declassification. I don’t have a scorecard (or really any way to accumulate one) but I’ll claim Elon is wrong way more often than he is right. Perhaps he’s too busy tweeting rightwing propaganda on his toy social network to actually do any work on all his predictions. And, of course, despite some of his claims, he is neither a software developer or a rocket designer. At best, he sometimes hires good people, motivates them and uses his megaphone of hype to raise the money (letting most of it stick to his fingers) to pay them to actually do what he claims for himself.

So why is this boy wonder revered by so many? (Giving his kids weird names I think) Again I have no way to know but I wonder if any of his fanbros are actually techies, in any of the fields where he makes his wild proclamations. Or is it just a fan club of gullibles to the noisy huckster? (Like Musk’s hero, the DJumpster)

I’ll focus on just one part of his hype, absurd schedules. Which I’ll put in a more likely form, so-called “optimistic schedules”.

Now I spent my life in tech, and some of it as a manager. And I’ve made my share of optimistic projections, esp. about schedules. And the fact is: a) often development teams are setting out to do the “impossible” and need super confidence and optimism, and, b) schedules, at best, are a challenge, but should be used wisely by management.

In my experience I’ve seen schedules: a) insane and impossible (i.e. we’ll call them, Muskedules, never happen), b) wildly optimistic (aka, WAG, achievable maybe one out of a hundred times), c) optimistic schedules (achieved maybe 25% of the time, but in other cases only slightly missed, and the actual schedule achieved was probably better than expected), d) “realistic” schedules (this sounds good and almost never exists, and when claimed, usually is achieved no more often than optimistic, due to the old notion of ‘work expands to fill all possible time’ (and my corollary, ‘and then some’), and, e) sand-bag schedules, i.e. government or bureaucratic schedules, which often are missed, usually also with huge cost overruns, just as much as any other type of schedule.

What I learned, especially when a manager imposes the schedule on a development team that was more aggressive than their estimated schedule, this can be good or very bad. It is good when basically you ask for 110% performance by the team – it gives them a challenge and with other motivations they often rise to meet it (my favorite version of this was the USA Olympic Hockey team winning in 1980, doable, but highly unlikely, but the sheer enthusiasm carried the day). IOW, often teams can do better than they think they can. But if you impose a schedule, like Elon does (or at least publicly since I am not privy to how he actually deals with his teams) that is 150% or even more outlandish 200% (and I’ve seen that in real life), the team knows it is impossible, and that they’re not going to meet it, and they’re going to get their asses kicked for something that could never happen, and this is unfair, so to hell with it, don’t even try.

But a padded schedule is almost as bad. If the team thinks it will be easy to meet the schedule then they’ll either work at a leisurely pace or they’ll add all sorts of subtasks to the required critical path tasks and thus blow that schedule too.

It’s a tricky balance and if it’s going to work (at least coming close to the schedule) and if it’s going to motivate better performance by the team (the achievable optimistic schedule) the schedule should be chosen for that purpose, to manage the team, not as usually is the case, to sell the project (and of course its budget) to those who hold the pursestrings over the team. And simply put, those aspirational (and ridiculous) goals of the moneybaggers gets in the way of actually getting the job done.

And that’s where Elon is at, again at least in his public pronouncements. Elon, like Trump, is putting out pure bullshit just to appease his audience and to enrich himself. And, I assume (except all the people who quit the self-driving software team who didn’t want to be responsible for killing people) that Elon’s teams are well aware of his hype and they have some more realistic schedule the actual managers set.

In the old days, before the invention of senior but pure tech jobs, like software architect, if you were a hotshot developer the reward for your technical success was being propelled into management. You got all the pay raises your pay bracket allowed more quickly than others and thus stalled. So you got promoted. But how often does technical success translate into being a good manager, or even an adequate one. How many great managers were also great developers? How do the skill sets of a great manager overlap with the skill sets of a good engineer?

Not much, in my experience, both speaking personally and by observation over three decades. I’ve seen (not including myself, at best I rate a B-) some very good managers and none of them were great techies. And I’ve seen some great techies (here I will include myself) and none of them every became great managers; in fact, the really smart techies resisted the whole promotion thing, which also then results in a short career or having to do a lot of job hopping.

So I’ll close with one my first hand lessons. Already a manager with some decent, but not great, success, I inherited the largest and most troubled software project in my division (which was primarily hardware types, which is they screwed up the software). This was the project’s last chance as cancellation was pending. The project (I won’t describe it because it yields too many clues about identities of people) had started with great enthusiasm and based on a couple of brilliant bits of hardware design. The “architecture” (such as it was in those days before a more formal notion of architecture as it applies to digital stuff) was actually quite innovative, but also very difficult to get to work.

After just a few days of intense reviews with the team I made an incredibly risky decision: I basically got rid of (nicely, found him another job) the most senior and accomplished member of the team because he was intimidating the rest of the team into a negative and plodding approach toward development, and, then I put almost the most junior team member in charge as team leader (only an informal designation) primarily because he was, in my view, both optimistic AND realistic.

And I set the team a much simpler task to accomplish in 90 days or else, what today would be called a proof of concept. The hardware had been designed with the idea of multiple modules, each controlled by its own microprocessor and software (rather than a lot of custom hardware) connected via the ingenious, but complex “processor independent bus” (now the norm). Back then the bus that connected different bits of the hardware was usually just an extension of the microprocessor’s architecture (and thus, also, only one microprocessor). So in this case we literally had three boards, each with a different brand of microprocessor (Intel, Zilog, and Motorola); one managed input devices, one managed output, and the main processor tied it altogether.

So what I believe was my wisdom, both as engineer and manager, was to set the task: take any input and generate any output, in this case, the simple task of pressing a key on a keyboard (unlike today’s keyboard’s that are “smart”, back then a keyboard generated raw electrical signals the input processor had to convert to which key was pressed) and doing some processing (in this case assign the key to a visible glyph with some color) and then display it on the output processor (a complex hardware set of both bitmap graphics and a character generator.

That’s all, press a key and see a predictable result. And do it in 90 days. As a bonus goal, another part of the team should integrate the communications processor and that is receive a single code from a computer via the telcom and pass that to the main processor to integrate with local inputs to drive the output processor.

The point of all this was instead of focusing on the complex functions this product would supposed to accomplish (nearly 500 graphical “commands” and hundreds of text “commands”), focus on the data pathways that would underpin all that complexity and just do the simplest task. Or, IOW, build the foundation before building then 10th floor penthouse.

Amusing when the day of the big demo came and the team, who days before the deadline had gotten a single character to appear had quickly expanded into to whole lines of text with wraparound AND multiple colors everyone, and perhaps most of all the team itself, was amazed. After two years of not a shred of anything working in this product now one could see light at the end of the tunnel. And one of the least good members of the team, then declared that I had not done what I’d said, in that I didn’t fire everyone since the demo was two days past its absolute deadline.

Within weeks this basic data path was being elaborated and soon almost daily new magic appeared on the screen. And this might then sound like a success story, but as I expect with Musk’s Starship, while a marvel, the product was still a failure since in its releasable form it was way past the time it needed to be in the market and hugely too expensive.

But I still consider this my biggest success as a manager (even compare to years later on a much larger project where I was nominally in charge, but really more like Musk, the visionary who was lucky to have hired some good managers who hired good people).

I had found what was holding the team back (this plodding and methodical and domineering senior engineer) and found what they needed instead, a fresh approach AND an ambitious but achievable schedule.

Now despite my numerous criticisms of Elon, nonetheless comparing SpaceX side by side with the plodding conventional Boeing SLS shows the benefits of hyper optimism and enthusiasm (in contract with the padded budgets of military contractors, otherwise known as welfare for engineers and stockholders). But at the same time, Elon’s absurd statements, just as hype for the stock market and his fan club does everyone a disservice.

Balance is the key, optimism is essential but a little goes a long way, and the right amount is what makes the miracles.

Online fame

I was surprised to receive an email from Google recently. I’d forgotten all about thing that the email was about. Google was notifying that a place (aka, POI, Point Of Interest) I added to Google Maps now had had 50,000 views (today 54,612). Wow. I can safely say it took a while for this blog to get that many.

The place is not that obscure. In fact I was surprised it hadn’t already existed on Google Maps. I’d never added a place before and I was actually trying to add a photo (for the place) and surprised that no place marker existed. So I followed the onscreen instructions and it seems a while later the place was approved. So here’s my famous place, the trailhead.

Again, I was surprised this place wasn’t already on the map. The Wabash Trail is somewhat famous. And the Tobey Jack’s in Mineola is a hangout for the taco ride crowd. And the Trail Head actually is a noticeable place, a parking lot, some signs, an old fee box, picnic table, portapotty. Probably 10 cars can be there at once. And going west and north from the trailhead is a nice stretch of the trail.

btw: This is the actual unexciting photo I posted once I’d created my POI:

This one (below, from Darrin Ochsner) is actually a better photo:

My other place I added, Allen Cemetery near Blair Nebraska has only 1/10th as many views, which is not surprising, but, IOW, you don’t just get a ton of hits no matter what the place is. I added that place for the same reason. While the cemetery was already on the map as POI: Pioneer Memorial Cemetery, for some reason that POI didn’t allow adding photos so I had to add my own POI to attach the photo which I named as I did for the obvious reason given this is the photo I posted.

The photo, btw, only has 1466 views which is a little strange since, for a while, it was the only photo for this place. In a few other cases I’ve managed to get my photo attached to a place, so it appears when any click on the place occurs, not just when the list of photos is expanded and clicked. So, for example, for a brief time my photo was the photo attacked to a well-known place in Lincoln (the Sunken Garden) and quickly wracked up 13,618 views until some other took over. I have no idea why Google picks some picture to be the default for a place but it sure makes a difference. For a brief time my photo was the only one available for Stagecoach Lake in Nebraska and thus accumulated 23,865 views.

Now in terms of my famous place, the trailhead, which has over 50,000 views the two photos I have connected to it have only 3824 and 7046 so I guess the other photos attached to “my” place are preferred somehow.

Now meanwhile there is another POI that is just the Wabash Trace Trail itself and the photos I have connected to that POI range from 7951 to 67,777. My most viewed photo is 341,218 views (for a long time it was the only photo for that place). And Google reports to me that my 149 photos have a combined 1,408,709 views! And it’s strange since I see no correlation between number of views and either the quality of the photo or the fame of the place. My photo of the Forbidden City in Beijing (and its famous Mao picture) has 7456 but my quite nice (IMHO) photo of the also very famous Golden Gate Bridge has only 230.

But the point of all this is that it’s much easier to attach a few photos (and by coincidence create a POI) to Google Maps than it is to write this post and yet the views of my photos will be vastly more than the post. Is this because photos are more popular than words – not really. It is a statement of the influence of Google to bring eyeballs to content. I recall (not precisely) some kinda random photo on the maps that had like 100,000,000 views, vastly more than anything mine have gotten. But hitching your content to an already popular place is certainly the way to get your own views.

Now I’ve never done this blog, or photos, for the purpose of getting views, aka today’s fame currency. Obviously lots of people really care about this and work hard at it, with some getting enough success they even make some money. But I don’t care and certainly don’t get paid, I just do this for fun.

But it is interesting for me to think, in the twilight of my life, that these photos could go on getting views long after I’m dead. Immortality via something as trivial as a photo, which, btw, I work at a bit with an actual (and good) camera instead of a few phone snapshots. But I’ve now had to clear out two houses of dead people (my parents, my sister and brother-in-law) and one of the things I had trouble throwing out was lots of photos (my sister’s work is immortalized in a website with millions of views of its 22,000 photos). Photos somehow seem valuable, despite having no monetary value in that they capture a moment in time and have a story to tell. BUT, to who. I’d look through many of the photos I was tossing in a dumpster and they meant nothing to me (and quite possibly were forgotten even by the person who took them). BUT, posting them online to a site with massive amounts of traffic at least gets some eyeballs looking at the photos for a long time. I have no idea how long it will be until Google purges my photos but I suspect Google Maps will live longer than I do and other than POIs that have huge numbers of photos I assume Google might keep some of mine for a very long time.

I kinda wish I could be a ghost and come back and check in 2040.

Starting a new virtual hike

For years now I’ve talked about virtual hikes in this blog, i.e. doing treadmill in basement and converting via maps and GPS traces and Google satphotos and local photos into a pseudo-experience of actually hiking. The first of my old posts I’ll discuss here is 2 years of a virtual hike, mostly the Pacific Crest Trail, on 1Jul2012. The second is quite a bit longer post, more miles, more stats, more talk, 5 years on a virtual hike, on 8Jul2015, claiming 2071 miles of virtual hiking.

Now more connected with today’s post I’ll also mention the last of a set of posts, where I was collecting my own GPS data and plotting a nearby trail (hardly need GPS, the trail is on various maps and easy to find, so GPS is just to pretend it’s a wilderness hike and keep records to keep me motivated). This is Closed another gap on Wabash. In the current state of my physical fitness it’s now this one I will, quite slowly, hike.

Since all that vigorous hiking, where I dreamed I would do the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trek in Spain by my 70th birthday (as per the Captain in the movie The Way) things have changed a lot. Age has taken its toll and now significantly limits my capacity. First, one of the normal ravages of age, arthritis has hit and now much walking can be painful; I even now get quarterly steroid shots just to maintain reasonably ordinary mobility and my orthodoc halted my treadmill activity to 0 degree slope and a low MPH and even that can hurt a bit for even relatively short workout. Second, with regaining some weight (another set of dreary posts in the post, all my weight loss) my hypertension returned and much to my dismay I now have to use beta blockers which, for me at least, severely limit my exercise endurance (it feels like I have a huge weight attached, plus seemingly like of breath, even though I believe my cardio is fine (at least for 77YO).

So since for saving knees I can no longer do hard workouts on treadmill I switched to elliptical in basement. Now I’ve had the elliptical for over a decade but I never much liked it. Yes, it’s a great workout, but even with less years I feared falling. So I have to pay a lot of attention, which means: a) I can’t read my Kindle and listen to iPod, as I did on treadmill, and, b) even watching TV can be a little iffy. So, while I still get some CV workout on elliptical I get very few miles.

But it’s worse than that. With a combination of a variety of stresses, plus no longer having a goal (doing the Camino) it gets very easy to skip workouts. So I’m really lucky if I manage to force myself to get 120 minutes a week, which really is the minimum (for anybody, any age, who is still mobile).

I was reading an article today (one of my Spanish articles) that talked about various tricks to fool oneself into doing more exercise. The article was aimed at much younger people, but did describe tricks I’ve used. Today with more high tech exercise machines, actually videos interacting with the machine, have made virtual hikes or rides routine for many people.

So I decided to go back to having a goal AND publishing it (some I’m shamed into keeping up my numbers). And I’m starting from such a low base it should be possible to beat this really slow pace. So I’m using the nearby Wabash trail, which is actually known in detail on Google Maps AND therefore a set of directions, in walking mode, can get me the critical connection between distance and GPS coordinates. So even though my starting data is low (again, easy to beat then), I went back (I still was logging my limited workouts) and declare my starting point to be Jun 2023. So here’s the “progress” (a snail could beat me) to date:

date	stop	mapdist	actdist	cume
6/3	41.21342,-95.8051	0.7	0.75	0.75
6/6	41.209524, -95.792672	1.5	0.77	1.52
6/7	41.215228, -95.781243	2.2	0.72	2.24
6/9	41.210947, -95.767543	3.0	0.74	2.98
6/12	41.202989, -95.757285	3.8	0.82	3.80
6/14	41.192450, -95.752200	4.6	0.75	4.55
6/16	41.190333, -95.740101 near tunnel under Dumfries Rd	5.3, 5.4 no stops	0.76	5.31
6/19	41.181101, -95.731764	6.1	0.77	6.08

Google Maps, while exactly tracing the trail only has 0.1 mile resolution, whereas I have 0.01 mile resolution on the elliptical, so it takes a little adjusted to convert each day’s distance into a coordinate.

You can see the pathetic amount of exercise (the total for a month was less than a day for me in my earlier virtual hikes). But this is start to now exceed. Even though the elliptical is lower impact, even than mild treadmill I’m still somewhat limited in how much boring stationary activity I can stand, plus how much my knees can hold up without pain. But I can do better than this, mostly with frequency of workouts and then eventually a bit more distance.

Converting all this to something visual, here’s that hike so far, as calculated by Google:

Now as you’ll see on my Wabash post (link in text above) this part I’ve walked before and recorded my own GPS trace. In fact, I’ll stay within the range of my own GPS data for quite some time (I didn’t do all of the Wabash before).

Now to put this in perspective, here’s Google’s tracing of the entire Wabash (a nicer trail, btw, than much of the Camino):

While that doesn’t look that huge, the trail does go to the Iowa and Missouri border (I’ve been to that bit). So my June recorded distance is only 1/10th of the entire trail which would extrapolate to about 30 weeks to finish, but I think I’ll set a goal of 1Nov2023 and see how I do (I do have a number of trips in that time which will interfere).

And just a tiny bit of what this looks like, a shot from Google Streetview of a bit of the trail I’ve actually walked (much of the trail is in woods and thus there are few photos, interestingly, I’m going to show you a few of my own which are now immortalized in Google Maps)

This is one of the few places the trail goes under a road (usually it just crosses the roads) but you can get a bit of feel for what it looks like.

So I’m going to go ahead and cheat a bit and post one of my photos, now on Google, which is still weeks ahead and so something for me to use as incentive so I can do a post to explain it.

So this spot is end of June, by extrapolating my snail’s pace, so let’s see if we can manage to beat that a bit, my first little incentive of this virtual hike to pick up the pace.

added: I just thought that potentially I should do the Cowboy Trail instead of Wabash. Nominally that is over 180 miles, one of the longest in US. I never even hiked a mile of it, but I have sometimes driven next to it. Looking at some pictures of the Camino I felt the central part of that trek was quite similar to the Cowboy (equally unpleasant being in hot and dry country with no shade and walking near a highway, not the romantic image that people (like me) had of the Camino). Now, it could be, now with new car, this also might be a substitute for geodashing, to actually get out once a month or so and go to some location on that trail chosen somewhat randomly. The minimum driving time is about 3 hours (one way) so it’s not a simple trip, but combining my need for incentive to do stationary exercise with something to substitute for geodashing to get out of house more often, this might actually work.