Walking

As long standing (and long suffering?) readers of my blog will know, before Long Covid moved in to stay I used to go for a lot of country walks. Now that breathing is something that has to be monitored and handled with care, this is obviously not possible. What I have been doing though is a daily walk, building it up very slowly.

I started in late January by walking round the block, the same route every day - a distance of 0.5 miles. The idea is that doing the same route gives me less decisions to make (decisions make me tired) and also gives me landmarks to measure how I'm doing.

So, many months later, I'm now up to one mile and the walk now extends to take in the park which is nice.

Things I have learnt:

1. Walk slowly. I'm naturally a bustler but, if I walk too quickly, I run out of breath.
2. Walking on grass (or in snow) makes it much harder to breathe.
3. It's easier to walk earlier in the day when I'm not so tired. This only dawned on me last week when I ran out of breath and only just made it home.
4. When I run out of breath and start to feel dizzy, I need to stop for five minutes ... even if I'm nearly home (see point 3)!    

I am now an expert on the local front gardens, who has what plants and which houses have dogs or cats. You can find something interesting on even the shortest walk.

But ... it's not countryside. Nor is this but it's a lot more like it ...

This is the view from the slightly soggy bench where Jack, Rose and I had a picnic last weekend. This is Spiceball Park which is in the middle of Banbury, right next to the canal and it's the furthest I've walked from home. It was so nice to see all that green and the trees (and my flask of tea was good too). After the picnic we had a bit of a walk round by the river and back along the canal path.

By this point, we realised that I'd probably done a bit too much so Rose and I sat on a bench for another rest while Jack found me a conker. The walk home was very slow and I ended up leaning on Rose before we got there. But - I'd walked two and a half miles all together. It's not something I could do regularly but it did me good. I was wondering why my face felt different and I realised it was because I kept smiling.