Stepping up

Today’s walk was up and around my local hill. We walked up to the park along horizontal and then steep sections. We had a look round, sat on a bench for a while, then we carried on and walked further than we did before.

Clearly I’m not doing this because it’s part of my life. I don’t need to walk to collect water or food. But I’m doing it for my health, a first world problem.

Anyway it’s more than I’ve done for a year and it’s got to be good for my heart. I now need to build up my distances safely, because after suffering a pulled calf muscle I don’t want to do that again!

Today’s uphill walk

The last three days we have done mainly flat walks, but today my hubby and I decided to climb up our hill. We need to get more heart points on my phone and the best way to do that was trying to walk up the hilly side streets in the area. It also got us away from the traffic on the main road. There are some streets that go up, and some across, so by walking up, then along, I managed to keep the pressure off my calf muscle that sometimes gets really tight after I pulled it a year or so ago. Also hubby is not as young as he was so it gave us both a breather. Finally we reached a little park and sat for a few minutes looking over the view and enjoying the trees in the park. Then up again, to reach the main road at the top of the hill and along it’s crest, before taking another horizontal route to get to our road and a few more hundred steps steeply downhill. Four days in a row we have walked. My arm shakes and so we hold hands or he holds my arm. It’s good to be out and about.

Steps blue, heart points green

You can tell I was busy on my essay over the last few days, there’s a big hole in my walking and heart rate records. I’m trying to do over 5000 steps a day and get my heart points to twenty… Well I didn’t manage it on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but I did today. Partly on a short walk round Westport lake and also around a car park a few times while I was waiting for a friend… Phew, glad to be walking again!

Not enough heart points

Walking in the almost 30°C heat, in full sunshine is uncomfortable and tiring. I’m not used to those temperatures here in the UK. We are basically lucky to get a few days of tepid sunshine in the summer and it generally heats up more in August.

So anyway, I have a small challenge with myself to do 5000 steps a day or hopefully more, and to get up to 20 heart points by walking faster than usual. But by the time we had walked round the lake I’d done around 4000 steps and 8 heart points, but I guess the heat slowed me down.

Tell me not to obsess about exercise, but I can’t help it, I wasn’t doing any really two years ago….