Weight Loss and Learning Ingress – Part 1

Hello Everyone, I am Ingress Agent Powin and this is my first post about my tales from Ingress.  I started playing Ingress this last weekend after a recommendation and invite from a good friend of mine.  I currently play a lot of PC games including Minecraft and Flight simulators and I love the idea of a game that implements the world around you as the game world.  Another thing that I like about Ingress is that it is enticing me to walk around more in order to capture portals and play the game which in turn will help me with another goal of mine, weight loss. It’s a great motivator, because I haven’t had this much fun walking around until now.

When I started playing Ingress last weekend I was right around 300 lbs at 6ft 2 1/2 inches so I have a good ways to go. On Friday mid afternoon a friend and I went to downtown to try out this new game. We basically stayed around these 3 friendly portals to hack them over and over to try and get some portal keys and make a control field since they were right near each other. It was awkward and funny because 2 of the portals are in the same parking lot. However, this parking lot was a church parking lot with kids playing in the playground next to it. So the whole time me and my friend were thinking “I wonder if they will end up calling the cops thinking we are checking out the kids”. Thankfully, they never said anything and we did what we came to do and we went on our way.

On Saturday I headed back downtown solo, and walked just over 5 miles in a little over 2 hours.  During that time I made it to level 2 at around 29,000 AP, so I was really close to level 3. I also captured a few portals, made a few control fields, and did a lot of hacking along the way! Its always nice having your name on things (ie portals,resonators, and mods). Most of this day’s events were just me walking around and hacking. However, at one point of the day I think there was someone doing drive-by hacking/bursting cause I kept getting emails that an enemy agent was attacking my resonators.  So I was dealing with that by trying to hurry over to the portal he just hit and recharge it. Unfortunately, I was on foot, so he was hitting them faster than I could keep up.  Thankfully, he would just set off a few bursts and drive away. He ended up leaving after a few rounds of that which lasted about 20-25 minutes.

Sunday was mostly uneventful. I was tired and my legs hurting from walking so much.  I know I am a baby but when you have 300 pounds to track around with you and then you do 5 miles in one session it hurts some. I did however drive out to a park that had a L2 portal with all L2 resonators. I started blasting away and knocked out ⅞ resonators. However, the 8th resonator was out in the middle of the pond and barely within my attack circle while standing at the edge of the pond. So here I am blasting for minimal damage and then it starts recharging. So I blast some more and used up all my XM plus the XM available in a 500m radius and it still stands at 100%. So I just ended up leaving it and going home because I needed to be somewhere later and did not have time to mess with it.

By the end of the weekend I spent about 5-6 hours playing Ingress and ended up getting level 3.  After weighing myself at the end of the weekend I was down to 293 pounds. I am also trying to pay attention to what I am eating. Mainly concerned about the quantity of food I eat as that is one of my downfalls.

I’m looking forward to playing more Ingress and leveling up more as well as hopefully losing more weight along the way.  I will be detailing my adventures here as I go, I hope you enjoy them. Also remember resist the light! VIVA LA RESISTANCE!