(iPhone photo #30 in my 2012 365+1 project)
I can see this lake from my office. If there weren’t cars parked between me and them, I’d probably while my day away watching the ducks. The cars just aren’t that entertaining.
I can see the lake, though, and I can see the people walking around it. There’s a 1/2 mile track circling it.
When I decided I needed to exercise hard enough this year to get in shape to do a long hike at some vague and possibly imaginary point in the future, my first thought was that I needed to buy a new treadmill. I have one that is so old nothing can be adjusted on it. It has one incline, and it will not budge from it. The monitors do not work. You can only guess how far you’ve walked on it. Still, it basically works if you’re in the mood to feel bad about your treadmill. I didn’t want to be embarrassed for it every day. I wanted a new one with working monitors and online syncing to new workout plans and Nike + workout logs.
Keep dreaming, right? Before I can buy a new treadmill I have to find the energy to clean out the room the current treadmill is in. To say nothing of saving up the money. Alas, this will not happen this week.
I don’t really like treadmills anyway. So there. What I like is to walk outdoors. Nonetheless, what I didn’t want was to walk around the lake. I can see everyone who walks around the lake from my office, which means that everyone who works in my building can also see everyone who walks around the lake. I can see who is speedy and who is slow and who has bad posture. I can see them all, and I can judge if I so choose, and that judgment is the last thing I want to subject myself to. I want to walk without being watched.
I stand by the feeling, but giving into it sure does mean the waste of a good walking lake. Thus, I have braved the stares of the floor-to-ceiling office windows, and I have hit the track as many afternoons as I could muster for the past couple of weeks.
I might be judged, but my resting heart rate loves me anyway, and I am sleeping better at night than I almost ever do. All this, and I have yet to even come close to my ultimate goal of walking an amazingly long distance. I did four miles today, and that’s the most I’ve done at one time yet.
I may have collapsed immediately after, but…four miles! Yay! Yayish, at least.
And if the best you can do is a yayish sort of day, so be it. Just go for it. Walk proud and prosper.
