As of this week, it\u2019s a year since our fateful meeting with our doctor, the one who set us on the road to doing some serious walking.\u00a0 Going public about what we were attempting was my way of being accountable.\u00a0 Our grandson, Colt, calls it playing the \u201cstep game.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a game for him.\u00a0 After all, he routinely does 17,000 steps a day without giving it a second thought.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not true for me.\u00a0 It takes time and energy and determination.\u00a0 When I\u2019m going full out, I walk at a rate of 1,000 steps per 10 minutes.\u00a0 In other words, it\u2019s an hour of walking for sure.\u00a0 In the beginning, a thousand steps took a lot longer than that, primarily because I had to sit down and rest between laps.\u00a0\u00a0 Now I can do an hour and be done.<\/p>\n
My yearly step average is 10,343.\u00a0 My weekly average took a sharp dip last week due to four days of driving back to Seattle from Tucson.\u00a0 One of those days was a 2,000 step day and another a 5,000.\u00a0 I walked extra steps over the weekend, but didn\u2019t quite hit the 10,000 average for the week.\u00a0\u00a0 My daily mileage for the year is 5.2 miles.\u00a0 That\u2019s 5.2 miles a day for a year!\u00a0 That comes to a total of 1898.\u00a0 That means I could have walked from Seattle, Washington to Bisbee, Arizona.\u00a0 For the first time in my life, I can feel actual muscles in my legs.<\/p>\n
Bill is walking a little less than I do.\u00a0 He averages about 6,000 steps a day, but his stride is vastly improved from the little old guy cane-assisted shuffle from last year at this time to what it is currently\u2014a real step; a man-sized step.\u00a0 He still has some back pain, but he walks in spite of the pain, and the pain is much reduced from what it used to be.<\/p>\n
We have both dropped sixty pounds and kept it off despite being on a six week book tour.\u00a0 When we\u2019re home Bill does most of the cooking.\u00a0 He watches the carbs and calories.\u00a0 We have banished bread and potatoes from our household.\u00a0 We no longer have pancakes or waffles.\u00a0 (Well, maybe, once in a while as a special treat.)\u00a0 We have learned to eat less.\u00a0 And when we\u2019re on the road, we\u2019ve learned to make better menu choices.\u00a0 Last week, on the road, I was really tempted by that \u201cfully loaded baked potato,\u201d but Bill saved me by ordering extra asparagus for both of us.<\/p>\n
We are both wearing clothing that hasn\u2019t fit us in more than a decade.\u00a0 That in itself is pretty amazing.<\/p>\n
Three years ago, when we went on our first Silverseas cruise there was an airline delay that kept us standing in line at the airport for the better part of four hours.\u00a0 While we were on the cruise itself, Bill\u2019s back was so bad that we never left the ship.\u00a0 We came away from that believing that our cruising days were over.<\/p>\n
Not so.\u00a0 The past year has changed all that.\u00a0 At the end of May, we\u2019re rewarding ourselves with another Silverseas two-week long adventure.\u00a0 This time we expect to be walking both on and OFF the ship.<\/p>\n
For those of you who have written to say that you\u2019ve been following my lead?\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 And please, keep me posted on your progress.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s wonderful to learn that what we\u2019re doing is helping others.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite TV programs is the Red Green Show.\u00a0 As he says at the end of each show, \u201cKeep your stick on the ice.\u00a0 We\u2019re all in this together.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As of this week, it\u2019s a year since our fateful meeting with our doctor, the one who set us on the road to doing some serious walking.\u00a0 Going public about what we were attempting was my way of being accountable.\u00a0 Our grandson, Colt, calls it playing the \u201cstep game.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a game for him.\u00a0 After […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-iW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1175,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions\/1175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}