Sunday started well...I decided to get an early start on my Fitbit Challenge walking by taking an 8 mile walk first thing and being mostly done with obligations for the day by about 10 am. With that in mind, I headed out the door and out to the trail.
The Centennial Trail was, as always, a deeply ugly place. This is a favorite spot that we used to visit even before we moved to Snohomish. Given that I now walk and bike by it several times a week, it has deep associations for me.
More ugly landscapes.
This is the point where my simplistic tale of a Sunday morning walk becomes a tale of wretchedness, a cautionary tale. Dubuque Road has been the turnaround point for long walks and short bicycle rides for the better part of a decade now. I used to walk it with Goldie, our yellow lab, when she was younger and up for long walks. The thing is, I had it pegged at about 4 miles from my starting point.
As I reached the Dubuque Road today, I blithely checked my trust pedometer to see what it was showing for distance walked. I expected it to say about 4 miles. To my shock and dismay, the the Fitbit flashed a message of subtle horror to me: "3.22" it said, with an understated high tech smirk.
I have been working in the corporate world for about 30 years now. I am used to maintaining a poker face or a sarcastic developer smirk. I did not rage and howl. But inside, I was reeling. For years now, my walking and biking distances have been overestimated by about a mile and a half, when you consider the two way trip. I have been Living A Lie....
I did walk on, as far as the point in the path parallel to Centennial Middle School. That took me to the 3.5 mile mark, setting up a nice 7 mile walk. It was a mile less than I had planned this walk to be but it would have to do.
Walking home, sadder but wiser, I decided to bury my shame in a coffee binge. The Iced Americano provided for me at SnoTown Espresso was tasty and the barista friendly. One thing I love to do when out running errands is to get a sense of the story behind the people I interact with and I had a few minutes of fun interaction with the barista, who it turns out works as a dental hygienist during the week. She has been working this Espresso stand for a while and was covering today for a co-worker's vacation.
She did look at me oddly when I asked which job was more fun, so I moved along before she could become too alarmed and decide to summon the authorities.
As I walked along, I happened to notice a fairly large and dangerous looking slug oozing across the walkway, It was clearly waiting for me to be distracted so that it could turn and attack me all unprepared. Fortunately, I have been warned about the duplicitous and deadly nature of these innocuous seeming molluscs...
There's a lot of yellow in this picture...
