I am back in Portland and fully recovered from my jetlag. We also seem to be on a short hiatus from the awful heat. By all rights I should be going for a walk. Right now.
The heat has definitely thrown me off my walking. As did my travel. But I think what really did it was that the unsettled feeling that motivated me to get out of the door disappeared. I had long suspected that my walking was associated with the loss of my father. The timing always made sense and now that the acute grief has passed, my old inertia has returned.
I have made some progress though. I am 126.8 miles into my second 500 mile walk. However I seem to have also lost interest in tracking. I now regularly go out for walks without my handy app tracking my mileage. The good news? When I do hit 1,000 miles I will be confident that I have undercounted my mileage. The bad news is that I have no idea when I hit my second milestone. To rectify this situation, I just invested $15 in what is basically a fancy pedometer. It tracks my distance whenever I wear it and it syncs to an app on my phone. This is a massive improvement on my old method. RunKeeper, the app I have been using to track my mileage, used to crash my phone, so I always had to bring my mother’s old iPhone with me to run the app.
The bigger question is why bother tracking at all. if I am walking, that is all that matters, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, the goal is to walk and I have not abandoned that completely. But I am hoping that getting back to tracking without having to drag a separate tracking device with me will help keep me motivated to at least achieve my goal.
I hate not achieving a goal. Especially one that I have already given myself a reward for. I have decided (somewhat arbitrarily) that my Fun Home ticket was my reward for the second 500 miles. Therefore I need to retroactively earn it. Obviously the fact that I am typing out this post rather than walking when it is only 67 degrees out means that I still have some work to do when it comes to motivation.
But I have not been a complete slacker. I have been redirecting a lot of my walking mojo towards the purge. Which is all for the good. And believe me, is quite a workout in and of itself. So here is the deal I am making with myself today. This afternoon when I finish work, I will either put 30 minutes into the purge or go for a walk. And now that I have said that publicly, I will really have to do it.