Walking Journal Day Two

Thought I'd try keeping a log of my daily walks. After battling a bunch of aches and pains the past few months, I'm starting the RealAge Workout, which is a bit milder than my previous workout schedule. The Phase 1 goal is to walk at least half an hour every day for 30 consecutive days. I'm modifying that slightly by adding a brief Movement Prep routine (about five minutes) taken from Core Fitness, and hopefully adding some yoga as often as possible.

The first walk was actually on Thanksgiving, with the family. We walked about 50 minutes along the river downtown.

Today I walked to the local branch of our library, at Hillcrest Shopping center. The majority of the walk was on the irrigation canals in our neighborhood. It's a fairly relaxing way to walk, albeit a bit muddy this time of year. The temperature was in the mid-30s, with some occasional drizzle. Here's a shot that shows how some of the water remaining in the canal has frozen over.


This walk normally takes about 14 minutes straight from my door, so I modified it by walking down to the local highschool and picking up the canal route there. It still ended up being too short by about 12 minutes, so I walked across the enormous parking lot behind the shopping center until I got to 30 minutes. Then it was another 13 minutes or so to walk home after a break to browse the shelves.

I never noticed it before, but this parking lot is rather large considering that it is almost always empty except for a handful of cars and an occasional delivery truck. Here's a shot:

I have to wonder what the people building the shopping center were thinking. Probably that there would be enough business that employees of the various businesses here would have to use this back entrance parking instead of parking out front. But from what I've seen, that's not the case.

Still, I'd rather walk through this lot than the front of the shopping center. It has one of those crappy dollar stores, a cosmetology store, a liquor store, a poorly aging Albertson's grocery store that we don't shop at, another discount shop of some sort selling crappy stuff, and a Payless Shoe Store that we patronize sometimes when the kids need shoes.

The library is tucked into a corner in the back, a bastion of relative serenity.