Walking The Line

Discovered a new website last night, called Walkit.com. Essentially, it provides you with waling maps and instructions from any address in London to any other address in London, along with distances, durations (for three speed levels), and the corresponding calories burned.

Me liiiiiike.

Truth be told, my normal walks of 'up to the local tube stop,' 'up the Kensington High Street,' and 'from Kensington to Marble Arch, through the park,' have been becoming a bit dull, and after nearly four and a half months and almost two and a half stone lost, I'm pretty much itching to stretch myself a bit, get back (if you'll excuse the appalling upcoming reference) into my stride, and really feel like I've walked somewhere.

So this morning I set out at about 6.40AM, with the intention of maybe walking from our house in Stratford to Mile End tube station, and picking up the tube from there into the office. it was easier, and more fun than I'd expected, and I still had a lot of time to spare, so I pushed on - past Stepney Green, to Whitechapel. At Whitechapel, I knew, I was sort of reaching the point in time where I should get on the tube. But then I saw the Gherkin and it called to me...

The Gherkin (or, being married to an American, 'The Pickle' as I now instinctively think of it), is a famous London landmark. It looks...well, it looks like many things, probably the safest of which to envisage is a Gherkin. Alternatively, it looks like a bejewelled spaceship from a 50s B-movie or adventure comic, or a kind of multi-coloured glass dildo. I'm assuming The Dildo would never have caught on, and so it's known more or less universally as The Gherkin (or the Pickle in some of the more discerning households). The point about the Pickle is that it's more or less associated with the area around Liverpool Street Station. I shouldn't really have pushed on to try and reach it, but you know how it is with new projects, you pretty much want them to start with a bang, so on I went. Except that the area around Liverpool Street is really rather complex at the moments, with Olympic roadworks and a series of rabbit-warren subways. Oh, and it should probably be remembered that I have the navigational instincts of a corpse. So I sort of lost track of both The Pickle and Liverpool Street. But never fear - whenever you lose one tube station, there'll be another one along in a minute. There was. It was Bank station.

Which is where things started to go seriously wrong.
I've always said I love the tube, and even that I love rush-hour. What was made apparent to me this morning is that I've always loved these things because I always usually get a seat by about Mile End. Bank station, if I can use a little vernacular here, takes the great big hairy-arsed, King Kong-sized monkey piss. It has a staircase of about 128 steps that you have to go down, followed by a bunch of Doctor Who-style corridors, followed by an upward staircase of about half the length of the downward one, and then you sit and wait forever, for a Central Line tube to breathe out some people, and suck you in on its in-breath. Personally, I waited 20 minutes, then started making use of my size and my elbows. got to work just about on time - though not before buying a small tub of Sudocreme for the office to smear into my feet when I got there - not buggering about with blisters again for weeks on end! What became clear was in the time it took me to force my way onto a train this morning, I could have walked on to St Pauls, by which point the tube was far more agreeable and empty. So - that's a plan for the future - though not tomorrow, as I have a big do on at work and therefore a) must be absolutely on time, and b) must not arrive looking like a bedraggled sweaty rat...
Hmm...well maybe if I only went as far as Whitechapel tomorrow...

Anyhow, the point of this is a) I've just looked it up and apparently, I walked 5.1 miles (or 8.2 km in the new money) this morning, am a medium-speed walker (with fairly heavy backpack), and burned around 472 calories in the doing of it. This is fasssscinating - takes me ten miles of static cycling at level 8 to burn 500 calories. Granted, it only takes me just under an hour on the bike, whereas it took me about 1 hour 40 to walk it. But of the two, the walk was far more enjoyable - and I don't intend to stop doing the cycling just because I'm doing the walking. So I think I've added a new dimension to my regime, and a really thoroughly fun one too. Must goop the feet though. Must allllways goop the feet.

In other news, had a call from my friend Mae last night. Bit annoyed all in all - she went to the doc to find out about some blood test results for her arthritis, only to be told "Oh you're borderline diabetic, have fun, b-bye..."

The thing that most annoyed her, I think, is that the blood was the same as it had been several times before, when she'd been judged just fine, and now she's being judged as borderline diabetic. Was able to relate to that - a while ago, I went to my doc and they said my blood sugar had come seriously down, to the point where, if I'd presented the year before, they'd have said I wasn't even diabetic....but the medical profession had reassessed diabetes since then, and made the diagnostic level more strict, so I still was, nehh! Bastards!

I think another element of her irritation was that she's holding a Tea Party on Saturday (to which d and I are going), in aid of Macmillan Cancer Care, and now, she'll be in the Miserable Foodie Corner (previous occupants - me), staring mournfully as people eat cake and Tiramisu and all the other Good Things In Life. Bit of a sugarholic, our Mae, so this will, in no uncertain terms, add an extra dimension of ass-suckery to a life already pretty well-stacked with ass-sucking.

So...erm...in case you missed it, that sucked.

In other news (ie news that's not all about me, me, me!), d had a CT scan this morning. Of her head.
Wish I could have been there, to be honest, but this close to the big work do tomorrow, they're a bit frowny about things like that. Apparently, she was having her head examined because pretty much the whole inside of her face is aflame with infection - ear infections, sinus infections, tooth infections - they booked her in for a retinal screening yesterday, but hopefully we won't find out her eyeballs are infected! Anyhow, after some long years of bitching to NHS doctors that no, really, it wasn't just a cold, the last time she went to see them, they referred her to a specialist, who took one look inside her lugholes and went "Holy Christ woman, you're infected to buggery!" - hence today's scan. Results in about a fortnight, assuming you believe anything the NHS tells you any more...

Back to me, me, me - forgot to record this a couple of days ago - Monday's blood was 5.4, and this morning's was 5.7 - after my 5 mile walk, which means it was probably Too Bloody High beforehand. Need to keep recording these, as on the 25th, I have my annual diabetic review AND a dietician's appointment, and they're gonna want to know these kinds of scintillating details. Oh, and I just found a picture of myself online, from February this year - just before I started this experiment. Erm...wow. I'm still no supermodel, but damn, I can see what people men when they say I've changed since starting this thing.  Which takes me briefly back to Mae - I went to interview her for a feature in my magazine last week. Last night, she told me something that made me happy...
Being a journo, I bought her breakfast in a pub before we started on all the interview stuff. It was, I think, the first time we'd actually seen each other since I'd started this experiment. I took her order, and went to the bar with it. Then I realised I didn't  have the table number, so I bounded back to get it, and dashed back up to the bar. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but last night she told me: "I watched you do that, and you sprinted back to the bar. I watched that, and I had to smile, cos I was thinking 'Well, no way would you have done that a few months ago..."

She's right actually. I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have voluntarily gotten out of the house at 6.40 in the morning and walked five miles before going to work either. Seems I'm not just Disappearing after all.
I'm Changing...