Another nice round number… 40! That means I’m 4/9 of the way there. Not bad. I won’t lie, it feels like I’ve been doing this a long time. That said, the results have been pretty good. I think maybe better than when I was doing the slow carb thing. Unfortunately, I had a higher starting point than the last time I did a diet, so, it’s gonna be awhile yet. I’m psyched to see where I can get to in the next 50 days though.

Not a lot happened today. Mostly I just ate on diet and… hung out at home since I got to have a WFH day thanks to Labor day weekend.

So let’s just get to the random fact about 40, shall we? Let’s go to my most hated board game. That’s right, there are 40 spaces on a Monopoly board.

39. There was pizza at work today. Lots of pizza. Delicious pizza. Free pizza. I wanted to eat it. So. Badly. Instead, I ate my boring lunch that I brought with me. For the moment, I want the results of sticking to this diet more than I want the delicious taste of pizza filling my mouth, so… my willpower won out.

I got back in from my run maybe 30 minutes ago. I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t great. Better than last time though. I can really only see it being 3 things… 1, it’s hot and humid… last time it was hot and humid I was still struggling like this. 2, it’s the fact that I added in a 3rd run each week. 3, this diet isn’t really conducive to running. The last one seems the least likely, simply because I did have a couple days where it felt like I was almost there with the running. In any case, I’m gonna keep on keeping on with it.

I did get to try out my fancy new watch and headphones. The watch is pretty great really. I’m sure the more expensive ones are nicer in a lot of ways, but, I like a lot of the things I didn’t get it for… like seeing my texts pop up on it. The heart rate thing is kinda neat as well, if largely useless… I mean, outside of when I’m running maybe. But, I got it for the GPS so I could leave my stupid phone at home when I run. It seems to be at least as accurate as the phone is, they pretty much agree on 3 miles for my running route.

The headphones (which, for those of you who didn’t see me mention them before, have a built-in mp3 player, to compensate for the fact that this watch has no music playback capabilities) also work really well. I’ll have to cycle in and out music from time to time… it only has 4 GB capacity… but really that’s plenty for my current runs. The strangest feature on it is it’s “ambient sound” feature, which seems to utilize microphones on the device to put outside sounds into my ears since the headphones muffle them. It’s kinda weird. I thought it might be useful for the run to hear cars and such, but really I feel like it didn’t help that much. I dunno, I’ll probably keep trying it for awhile and see if it grows on me. If not, I can always turn that feature off.

Anyway, 39. That’s the number of delegates that signed the US Constitution.

See you for 40.

Here we are at day 38. It wasn’t too bad. Except for the weather… it’s still disgusting out.

My weigh-in this morning was the lowest yet, which always makes me happy. Food today was all fine as has always been the case since I started. I gave blood today as my employer was hosting a blood drive. And I got my Amazfit Bip in the mail. I had also yesterday received Sony headphones with a built-in mp3 player. I am using the combination of them to replace the use of my iphone 7 plus during runs. So, they’re kinda new toys and I’m excited to try them out. The Bip, if you don’t know, is a smartwatch – probably the cheapest one you can get with a decent GPS… and it also has a heart rate monitor. It doesn’t include the ability to play music, hence the Sony product, but without getting into the Apple Watch price territory, there doesn’t seem to be a smartwatch that has BOTH a GPS and music playing capabilities… you always have to choose one or the other. Anyway, the Amazfit Bip is only like $80 – Not bad at all.

Oh right, 38 fact… uhhh….  it is the degree of N latitude that demarcates North Korea and South Korea.

See you for 39!

37. Did you know that 37 degrees Celsius is the equivalent to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit? That is your body temperature. Or you know, maybe not yours, but it’s typically considered a normal one. Maybe you’re abnormal.

I cracked my iPad screen today. Like, within an hour of waking up. That sucked. Otherwise today was pretty good. Still deciding what I will to about the iPad, to include just continuing to use it as it is… I’m not sure of the quality of a $22 solution on Amazon… to get Apple to fix it is way too expensive. I’m kind of sort of thinking of selling it on ebay and getting a pixelbook.  We’ll see.

Diet is going fine. The weather sucks. I don’t look forward to running on Thursday. Hopefully it goes better than yesterday.

Anyway, that’ll do for today. I’ll try to be more interesting tomorrow.

36. Another work from home day, which is always nice. I walked over and got a bowl of raw vegetables with some beef added onto it at a nearby store for lunch. I think they called it a Buddha bowl. But it was literally a bowl of vegetables. On top of some spinach. But not enough spinach to count as a salad, I don’t think.

I think I might have failed at giving you a random fact for 35. Oh well.

For 36, I have a real doozy for you. Did you know that 36 is the value of 6 squared? It’s true, just google it. Don’t act like you already knew. You’re not getting anything better today.

My run tonight was awful. It was hot, and it was humid. There were more problems from there. Suffice to say I think it was probably even worse than my very first one. Thursday will be better. I mean, it can’t be worse, unless I break my leg or something. Somewhere, someone out there now thinks there’s a chance I will break my leg on Thursday. And I mean, they’re right… but it’s no greater than the chance was before I said that.

Time to nix 36.

35. That’s a full 5 weeks on this diet. I still have awhile to go before I even reach the halfway point, but every time I put up a new number it kind of surprises me that I made it that long.

Lack of sleep caught up to me this afternoon… I just passed out for 3 or 4 hours and won’t up maybe 30 minutes ago and realized I needed to take Akima out for a walk… and also write this post. If it had just been the latter, I probably would have just stayed in bed and done 2 posts tomorrow (one in the morning, one in the evening) – because really, I’d rather have stayed asleep. I fear I may have screwed up my sleep cycle a bit.

Because I was so tired when I was writing my post yesterday, I skipped over a couple things I had intended to write down. One of them occurred just before the end of my run. In the very final stretch of my run, I got a driveby “Run, Forrest, run!”. Now, I typically assume anyone yelling things out of their car at runners is probably a teenager… and so, I feel a bit confused about it. I mean, this is a movie that came out in the early 90’s, and we have some kid who maybe wasn’t even alive then quoting it at a runner? I mean, I appreciated it and all, but I’m not sure I’m really deserving… Forrest ran much further than I did. Plus he had a longer beard than I do presently… and was in better shape. But hey, it’s something to aspire to.

The other thing happened a few minutes later as I was walking back to my apartment. Some group of girls was crossing paths with me (keep in mind that this is ~10PM on Market Street – in case you aren’t familiar, there’s plenty of bars and the like – So I’m assuming they had been drinking). One of them addressed me and said that they were going to call me “Patrick” from now on. I really didn’t know how to respond to being told such a thing by someone I am fairly certain I’ve never seen in my life. In hindsight, I kind of wish that I had asked why. But, in the split second of opportunity I had, I just said something like “Oh, ok. That works I guess.” So now I just have to wonder what inspired that comment – and why someone would want to call me Patrick.

Oops, this is a little bit past midnight. Oh well.

I’m super tired, so this is gonna be just a short one – only because it’s obligatory to post something 😉

Diet is still ongoing, doing just fine… nothing of interest to report.

Run today was pretty good, I think just slightly less good than the previous one. I know I had to walk just a bit earlier than I did last time, but my running app crashed on me so I don’t actually know what the pace was or anything like that.

No interesting fact for you about 34 because I’m too tired to look it up. Sorry.

33. Another Friday of resisting bagels. Did you know that to count to 33fro, 1would take you about 16 seconds? Go on, try it.

Hey guess what! The scale put me at 198.5 this morning! Finally, a number below 200! I’m pretty sure I know the reason why, but I think I’ll leave that unsaid.

Tomorrow will be another run, first week with a 3rd run… hoping it goes well!

Next up, 34.

I almost forgot I needed to post! Day 32 is at an end. Ummm… I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the number 32. It directly proceeds after 31, and it precedes 33. It’s the only number that does that. And according to some website I found it is used 11 times in the Bible.

Same old same old with the diet… the exciting news for me is on today’s run, #6. I took a solid 3 minutes off my previous fastest time, and came pretty close to completing the 3 miles without any walking (when I started walking my running app indicated I had gone 2.79 miles). And my legs were way less tired afterward than in previous runs. Even on Monday’s run, I was pretty exhausted afterward in a way that wasn’t true today. So I think I hit a significant breakthrough there. Since I’m adding in a 3rd run this week, we’ll see how things go on Saturday.

It’s worth noting tonight’s weather conditions were ideal… it wasn’t humid… it was pretty cool, high 60’s. That’s good running weather. I think Saturday will be similar (if I do it at night, might be warmer if I do it during the day). Next week looks like it’ll be a hot one, so it’s always possible there could be a regression if that turns out to be the case, but even so, this was good progress… my pace was faster by about a minute per mile, and that’s significant.

Tomorrow will be 33! See you then.

31! The first of a new set of 30 days.

Let’s see, something about 31…  Did you know that there are 31 days in the month of August? Woah. That’ll blow your mind.

We’re not going to talk about the scale for awhile. Why? Because it’s an asshole, that’s why.

Looking forward to tomorrow’s run… weather looks like it’s going to be amazing.

That’s it – See you on 32!