(Sub)urban Hike
Yesterday I was hoping to go hiking somewhere, but weather forecasts for the Seattle area suggested a 30% chance of rain. In my Seattle experience that typically means "it will rain 30% of the time". With that in mind, I planned a hike within the bounds of civilization; I aimed to walk from my apartment in Redmond to downtown Seattle. For those unfamiliar with the Seattle area, the biggest challenge to this aim is a rather large lake in between:
The purple line shows my approximate route as I ended up walking through downtown Seattle to graemlin's apartment in lower Queen-Anne. The whole route was a little over 28 kilometers. It took about 6 hours door-to-door, including 45 minutes of pitstops (lunch on Mercer Island, coffee in downtown Seattle while I tried to reach graemlin by phone). The walk was quite nice the whole way through, though the mid-section was undoubtedly the highlight. The park areas in South Bellevue, along with Mercer Island and the I-90 trail were exceptionally nice.
graemlin and I grabbed dinner at Dahlia Lounge before I bussed back to Redmond. I decided it would be wise to hit the gym, only to make use of some stretching apparatus to mitigate future soreness. In the end it was a 43073 step-day (with about 33500 steps directly coming from the hike). That translates to 34.7km using my typical stride-length! Today my gluts are definitely quite sore. My feet are a little raw in places, but there is fortunately no blistering. Ankles and calves are remarkably fine.
In other (belated) foot news, I ran my first 5km race last Sunday in Redmond. I placed 200th in a field of 554, with a time of 24:18... That was 2-3 minutes faster than I had run 5km in workouts. I think my anti-social software developer tendencies motivated me to flee the crowd, until I had established a nice bubble of personal space.
My results here
Me after the race
The purple line shows my approximate route as I ended up walking through downtown Seattle to graemlin's apartment in lower Queen-Anne. The whole route was a little over 28 kilometers. It took about 6 hours door-to-door, including 45 minutes of pitstops (lunch on Mercer Island, coffee in downtown Seattle while I tried to reach graemlin by phone). The walk was quite nice the whole way through, though the mid-section was undoubtedly the highlight. The park areas in South Bellevue, along with Mercer Island and the I-90 trail were exceptionally nice.
graemlin and I grabbed dinner at Dahlia Lounge before I bussed back to Redmond. I decided it would be wise to hit the gym, only to make use of some stretching apparatus to mitigate future soreness. In the end it was a 43073 step-day (with about 33500 steps directly coming from the hike). That translates to 34.7km using my typical stride-length! Today my gluts are definitely quite sore. My feet are a little raw in places, but there is fortunately no blistering. Ankles and calves are remarkably fine.
In other (belated) foot news, I ran my first 5km race last Sunday in Redmond. I placed 200th in a field of 554, with a time of 24:18... That was 2-3 minutes faster than I had run 5km in workouts. I think my anti-social software developer tendencies motivated me to flee the crowd, until I had established a nice bubble of personal space.
My results here
Me after the race
