About 8 weeks ago, I embarked on a routine of walking in the morning before work.  The first week, I walked four days, the next week five, and since then, with only two exceptions, I’ve walked 7 days a week.  The exception weeks I only walked 6 days instead of 7.

Those first couple of weeks I walked around a lake on a circuit that was 1.2 miles.  I could walk that in 20 minutes, even out of breath, and soon found a new place to walk that gave me a 2.5 mile trail.  I have bad knees and hips, so finding green space to walk that doesn’t have concrete walkways is important.  The green space I walk is full of lakes and the trail is dirt covered in sandy, tiny gravel.  And goose poop.  Lots of goose poop.

I’m 51 years old.  I’m fat.  I’ve been fat since I was 12 or so.  There was a lot of yo-yoing in those early years, while my mother and I tried diet after diet.  I was a relatively active kid; I swam and worked for the YMCA, and one whole summer I rode my bike 6 miles a day home from one of my lifeguard gigs.  As I got to college, though,  became much more sedentary.  I still dieted, with little effect.  At age 25, I gave up diets in favor of just living life.

Since then, I’ve probably not been so greatly fit, but I have not gained or lost a significant amount of weight.  I go up and down by 20 pounds here and there, but never go over my “top weight” and often am 30-40 pounds below that.  I am healthy in that I have no diabetes, my cholesterol is normal and even a bit on the low side, and my blood pressure falls within the normal range.  Any health problems I have are pretty much concentrated in my knees and my lungs.  I’ve had pneumonia a lot (fourteen times) and two knee surgeries.  So I have low-level asthma with minimal triggers, and creaky, painful knees.  I do take high blood pressure medicine to keep my ibuprofen-irritated blood pressure under control.  If I didn’t take the ibuprofen, I would not be able to move my knees.

My only reason for starting to walk was to give my knees all the help they could get.  I am seeing an orthopedist in August about my continuing knee issues, and I wanted to be sure that I had strengthened all of the surrounding muscles to the best of my ability.  I firmly believe in the concept of Healthy At Any Size, but that means I have to do my best to be healthy in the first place.  I do eat a varied and reasonable diet, but I also don’t deny a craving when it comes, and do not believe in starving.  In fact, I (and scientists) now know that diets don’t work because they starve the body.  Moderate eating of healthy foods, getting plenty of rest and reasonable exercise, are more important than weight loss.

But after eight weeks of walking every day, you would think I could stop hating it.  But I do hate it.  I hate sweating.  I’ve always hated sweating.  And my right knee hurts.  It hurts with every single step.  All this walking has not made it any easier for me to climb the stairs from the garage to the house when I get home from my walks, and trips up the stairs to bed at night are near agony.  When I get done walking, instead of feeling invigorated and awake, I feel tired and hungry.  I keep waiting for that “runner’s high” thing I keep hearing about. I walk faster than I did before, without getting winded.  I walk the 2.5 miles in about 35 minutes, which is a pretty good speed.  I have more stamina to do things like  yard work, and I’m sleeping a bit less than I was, although I’m not sure that’s a good thing.  Going from 7 hours a night to 6 hours a night is probably not the right direction.  I breathe easier, and if I need to hurry across a street I don’t feel like I’m going to die when I’m done.

I do what I can to make it interesting, since I really don’t like doing it.  I have my iPod fully stocked with music, and I turn it on and walk.  Those first few weeks, I tried to pick bouncy music that would force me to walk at a pace, but sometimes that pace is a bit too much.  I let my knee pain be the judge of that.  Sometimes I just want to be soothed while I walk, and I’ll listen to some piano music or new age stuff.  When I want to walk hard, I turn on rock, or some hot Spanish guitar music (Rodrigo y Gabriela is my usual choice).  It is something to pass the time, at least.  Sometimes I spend the entire walk staring at the ground, trying to figure out all the animal prints I see on my trail.  The shorter walk I did initially was closer to the mountains, and I saw bear tracks.  The longer walk has mostly goose tracks, horse hooves, dog tracks, and an incredible array of tennis shoe tracks.  Sometimes there’s the track of a bicycle tire or stroller wheels.  And the other day there were deer tracks.  So far, no bear, no cat, no elk.  And that’s fine by me, since I am walking in the early morning and don’t really wish to encounter any of those things.

I will keep walking, as much as I hate it.  I breathe better.  I have more stamina in general.  I don’t have problems walking longer distances as I need to throughout the day.  Even if I can’t climb stairs any better than I could before, there are other benefits.  Maybe, someday, I actually will be able to go hiking.  And skiing.

After all, I do live in one of those places where I should be doing these things!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2012 at 9:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.