It's walking and it's working - XIV

Get on up and go

There are mornings that I have woken up early as I like to do my walking exercise at dawn just as the sun is rising and the city is less busy, apart from trying to avoid meeting up with that devil dog and its atrocious owner. Then I feel, I am not that up to it, I need a bit more sleep.

Often, I do levitate myself off the bed by the force of will and get on with it, because I am left needing to get that 10,000-step threshold in the reckoning or I feel I am losing something. However, I do not beat myself up, like for instance, in April, for the last 6 days I barely got 5,000 steps done daily because I was a bit indisposed, however, since I had more than the 10,000-step average for the month by the 20^th day, it was not that bad, it just pulled down the average for the year.

Just pressing on regardless

The walking exercise that I began in late July 2020 is a lonely and individual activity that requires some discipline, dedication, and determination, I want to believe that somewhere in my lazy bones, I have some of all that. I get up, come rain or shine, in the light or the dark, feeling strong or weak and get out to do the steps.

For a while, I was seeing no effects, my weight stuck up where I never wanted it to be, I could not for the life of me understand what else I had to do, I was not going to go down some dieting route or get into the gym to find muscles in places I never knew they could exist. I was focused on the walking, keeping at it and convinced that eventually, something would begin to show. Observations by my boyfriend during our video conversations did not convince me of the expected changes.

Improvements are showing up

However, in the last 6 weeks, things have shifted, I have gone from the highest weight that the scales have truthfully displayed to losing over 8 kilograms. I am not at the best weight I attained in October 2020, but I feel it might soon get there and better.

When I started walking, I barely made 3,000 steps in a half-hour, now, I easily breach 4,500 steps in 30 minutes, though I do not think I can make it 5,000 steps, even if Brian has suggested I walk like one of the cartoon characters in Scooby-Doo, at first I thought he was referring on the one of the four-legged variety, but it was one of the bipedal females he was alluding to that I first thought was Daphne, but he meant Velma. He says he can’t keep up with my walking, even though if he stood by the Eiffel Tower, his legs might just dwarf the edifice.

The statistics are an impetus

In general, I can get my 10,000 steps done in 75 minutes, I have even managed 64 minutes, which is good going. Today, I stayed in bed and then for my late lunch break stepped out for just over 11,000 steps and then after a post-work nap, I added just over 18,000 steps leaving me with around 500 steps to hit 30,000 steps, so, I went for a quick stroll down that street and back to get that number done.

The way my health app breaks down the statistics of my activity gives me an idea of how well I am doing, the times when I could do 7 kilometres in an hour seems to have eluded me, I barely get a kilometre done in 9 minutes. However, getting my heart rate up for intensity is good and I try to work within the aerobic and anaerobic range, the cadence is usually around 140 steps a minute, though my eyes almost popped out when I saw 174 steps a minute this evening and then 177 steps a minute in my earlier walk. I must have been gliding or floating on air as I rarely get 160 steps a minute for my morning walks.

As a creature of habit, the morning walk has a route that yields just over 15,000 steps in 1:50 hours or less and that is before I start work at 8:00 AM. Even without an accountability partner, someone to imitate, or the urging of a coach or mentor, I can say more confidently that it’s walking and it’s working.