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| A view of the tower from our office parking lot. |
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| Entrance to the park. |
So one constant lately has been that several of us work on personal projects at lunch. We grab our laptops, head to Starbucks, and grab something like Subway on the way back. Simple and easy.
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| Me! |
My idea for a while has been to hike to Talcott Mountain State Park on our lunch break: a group of people usually does it a few times a year when it gets warmer, which it has been for about a week or two now here in CT. My variation on it was to take our laptops, get some coding in at the park, then hike back down. Today, we finally did just that.
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| My hiking buddy. |
According to Wikipedia, the trail is 1.25 miles long and takes 30-40 minutes. According to LoseIt, hiking up a mountain and back down for an hour of total exercise is 842 calories. Seems good to me!
Only one of my work buddies was able to go today. I'm hoping in the future we get more, but we will see. It's takes enough time that it's clearly not an 'every day' kind of hike: with lunch, etc, we took about 2 hours total to get back into the office. Fortunately, I have a very cool boss.
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Reached the tower! It wasn't open yet,
or I'd have taken pictures from the top. |
The biggest challenge of the hike is the first quarter mile or so - in some places it's a 30-40 degree incline, and it's never less than 10-20 degrees. This is one killer steep hill.
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| A view from the top! |
I don't know if it was the weight loss, or what: I'm down 8lbs in 8 weeks using LoseIt: I got a digital scale because my old one was garbage, and I suspect I wasn't actually down 7lbs when I last posted. Plus, I did rebound a little on my diet with cheat days - I didn't gain back more than a pound or two, but it took a few weeks to really turn around again.
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The trail levels out quite a
bit after the initial incline. |
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| Our office, looking the other way. |
Anyway, it was either the weight loss or the fact we've been doing 'light' exercise lately, walking with our daughter, playing basketball at the office, etc, but I didn't do nearly as bad as I have in the past. There have been points I was unable to make it to the tower, and had to turn around and head back down when other, more 'fit' coworkers were returning to their cars. I did have to stop a few times, and I was hacking quite fiercely at points (I forgot my inhaler), but all said it went pretty well for me!
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| A view from the park. |
We enjoyed the beautiful day on top of the mountain, got in some coding on a picnic table, then came back down and grabbed a Subway and a Starbucks like usual (though no sitting around in the coffee shop and socializing today).
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| Our picnic table! |
All in all, a very productive afternoon. It was a lot of effort, but on such a nice day it was great to get out and enjoy nature for a while.
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| Some shots looking down on the incline. |
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| More incline. |
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| The end of the inclined section. |
