Aug. 29: 5.11 miles in 1:34:08
Sep. 11: 6.01 miles in 1:32:01
I'll freely admit that these instances are both at the extremes of the range of speeds I've had. Even so, the data - conveniently calculated and presented, thanks to MapMyFitness - show an upward trend in speed along with the rising distances I've been putting in. I reached ten kilometers on today's walk; had I done that distance at the speed I posted on August 29, I would have needed thirteen minutes and twenty seconds more than I actually took this morning.
Another important upward trend is showing in the calculated number of calories burned, since that is the point of this whole thing. That is leading to results in the matter of what one of my friends calls "the decrescendo." The measurement of my weight is a little complicated, because I bought a new scale almost two weeks ago. I picked up a distrust of digital scales from my family, and carried it through to now. But I finally got tired of fiddling with the zero adjust dial on my scale, so I went out and bought one that not only measures weight consistently (which was a problem with my old dial scale, as well as the reason we didn't stick with our digital scale back in the 90s), but also has a weight tracking feature (that I've ended up not really using because I don't expect it to ever actually indicate an upward or downward trend). The readings on the two scales don't match up; the new one is three or four pounds more than the old one. Whatever. It looks like I'm down seven or eight pounds over the course of just more than five weeks. Not a bad progress rate so far, and losing over one pound per week on average is particularly good - because I have the feeling I might give back some of that loss next weekend when I go up to Ithaca.