Tag: walking

Favorite Physical Activities

Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?
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You know there is one physical activity… the real, honest answer for nearly all of us… you know… when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…

Now that that is out of the way, what is my second choice? There are two that come to mind. One is going to seem obvious if you read the previous post. The other is a little bit of out of the box thinking.

First, I like to go for walks. Imagine driving into the city with my beloved wife and a camera or two, then just picking a neighborhood and walking around while enjoying the company and the sights, and snapping off a ton of pictures that I can post to this page after we get home. That’s a quality piece of physical activity right there. The setting can be swapped out for other places. For example, instead of walking around Boston we could walk around a Disney World theme park. Perfect.

My second, less conventional idea for a favorite physical activity? Band practice. Yeah, you read that right. There’s no running around or anything like that, but band practice generally results in a bumped up heart rate and working up a serious sweat. You heard it here first. Band practice is cardio, babie. Rock and Roll.

Both of those are much more fun than the exercise I did just before I wrote this post. I ran in place for 45 minutes. My legs feel like rubber. I’m toast. I literally sit down and post something after my morning faux jog (pronounced “yog”, with a soft “j”) just to give myself some time to recover. That’s what I do for exercise every day, but it sure as hell ain’t my fav.

43 Days

Earlier I mentioned that I was in the middle of a streak of doing a 30 minute walk-in-place thing a day, but I didn’t know how many days the streak had been running.

I went back and looked it up. June 1, 2022 was the first day. That was 43 days ago.

I also looked up what the longest single walk-in-place thing I’d done was. It was Thanksgiving 2020 and I did a make-pretend 5k walk. My exercise app has it on file as a 3.2 mile indoor walk. 5k is more like 3.10686 miles, but I think I rounded up to make sure I hit the goal.

I wonder… instead of doing a 30 minute walk each morning… should I do an approximate 5k? I would have to get started earlier in the morning than I do now. I bet I could do it. Thanksgiving 2020, I was pretty sure I was going to die. Today? I bet I could do it.

Maybe tomorrow.

The goal with all the walking of course is our planned trip to Disney World in January. I want to be able to walk from one end of Orlando to the other without getting too desperately tired. The more walking I do in preparation, the easier that trip will be.

An Exercise First

I always talk about trying to close the exercise ring on my AppleWatch. I’m sure I’m annoying AF. I usually just walk in place for a few minutes at a time over the course of a day until I get up to 30 minutes.

Today I did something I’ve only done a couple of times since the start of the pandemic when the whole walking in place became a thing.

I did all 30 minutes in one go. It was the walk in place equivalent of 2.2 miles, which is quite a bit slower pace than I was doing back in late 2020, but I’ll take it.

I need to start using the exercise bike instead of walking in place, but for today I’ll take it. I’m kinda pleased with myself.

11 Minutes to Go

It’s 11:00. Past my bedtime.

I still have 11 minutes of exercise to do today. I’m trying to cram it all in at the last minute. My legs are so pissed off at me right now.

I’m sure Jen can get you the address to send flowers to when I kick it. Yippee.

ADDENDUM: I closed the exercise ring with 26 minutes to spare, and I lived to tell the tale.

Ouch

I was just doing my walking-in-place exercise-like whatever it is. I felt a bit of a twinge in my left ankle.

Ouch, babie.

I’m okay, but for a minute there I was afraid my 30 minutes was going to get shut down at 20 minutes.

Here’s hoping this isn’t something that’s going to be a thing, you know?

It Finally Worked

I’ve mentioned that we’re going on a trip to Disney World soon. I’ve also mentioned that my foot has been all screwed up and painful lately. I may have mentioned that I sometimes have a lot of back pain too.

The foot has been okay of late and the back pain hasn’t been much of an issue, but I get sore and tired pretty quickly and there is going to be miles upon miles of Disney walking so… I started going to the gym. I’ve been three times this week.

Now before you get all pissy, this isn’t going to be one of those lets all get healthy kinda posts. Screw that, this is about music.

When I go to the gym I almost always just walk on the treadmill until my foot or my back start complaining. It doesn’t take long. I’ve been shooting for 15 minutes to start with. Hey, screw you and your in-shape-body, stop laughing at me! Bullies. Anyway, I always bring my phone and my air pods (I used to bring ear buds but let’s embrace modern technology!) and I listen to music. I always hope that I can just let myself focus on whatever I’m listening to and not even think about the amount of time I’ve been treadmillin’. It never happens though.

Until today.

Today I put on that stupid Spotify playlist that I added to the side panel over there —-> yesterday. The plan was to put 8-10 songs that I’ve been in the mood for lately onto said playlist and updated it every so often. So much for that, it’s about 20 hours long now. Sorry. My plan is to shuffle it, but that is redundant since I only have a free account and that means anything on my phone is shuffled. Fine by me.

So there I am, walking along, listening to music, not being distracted from the clock slowly ticking upward toward the goal of 15 minutes. Then it happened. The shuffle brought me to “Still Got the Blues” by Gary Moore and I just got lost in it. That song is perfect, that recording is perfect, that guitar playing is perfect, that song is perfect (I think I said that already). I let it take me to where ever it needed to take me and the next thing I knew I had been walking for 20 minutes.

Thanks, Gary. Rest in Peace, Sir. I don’t know if you were playing Peter Green’s ’59 Les Paul standard on that one or not (the guitar that is affectionately known as Greenie and is currently owned by Kirk Hammett of Metalica) but I am choosing to believe you did and that is part of why the tone is just perfect.

Anyway, here are some Spicket River pictures and one from downtown Methuen because it’s Saturday and that’s what I do on Saturday…

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As I mentioned in a couple of posts yesterday, we are celebrating my beloved bride’s birthday this weekend. She asked for two things: One, to stay in her PJ’s all weekend, and two, for me to let her work all weekend. I will make it happen! I have a few chores to do this weekend, and I need to go grocery shopping. The rest of the time is (hopefully) going to be spent on RPM (probably not though, let’s be realistic). In fact, I’m going to go spend a few minutes recording some acoustic guitar right now.

Happy Saturday, everyone and thanks again to Gary Moore.