Years ago a fan sent me an e-mail complaining about the name of one of the characters in the first Walker Family book, Hour of the Hunter.\u00a0 The character\u2019s name was Fat Crack Ortiz, and my correspondent wanted to know why I gave him that name.\u00a0 I was a bit perplexed about how to respond, I mean where did he think nick names come from?<\/p>\n
My response was short and to the point:\u00a0 “Think of any plumber you\u2019ve ever met.”<\/p>\n
His reply?\u00a0 \u201cToo much information.\u201d<\/p>\n
You may want to file this blog post in the same spot.<\/p>\n
We went to see our doctor a couple of weeks ago and he gave us what my mother would have called \u201ca severe talking to.\u201d\u00a0 In a word\u2014get off your butts!\u00a0 He suggested we get a trainer or join a gym.\u00a0 Nope, that\u2019s not gonna happen.\u00a0 Ever.\u00a0 I am not and will never be a gym rat.\u00a0 And I am not and never will be an athlete.\u00a0 In Janis Ian\u2019s song, At Seventeen, the words that spoke to me the most were these:\u00a0 \u201cFor those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was tall but clumsy.\u00a0 My near-sightedness compounded by a severe astigmatism meant I had zero depth perception.\u00a0 (That changed twenty years ago now, thanks to Lasik.)\u00a0 But my being out there on any kind of playing field is a totally foreign idea.\u00a0 Totally!<\/p>\n
This time our doctor had a surprising ally\u2014our new iPhone 6s. Built into the phone is an app called Health.\u00a0 It has any number of options that will let you see how you\u2019re doing in terms of exercise\u2014number of steps taken, number of miles walked or run, number of flights of stairs climbed.<\/p>\n
In order to make it work, you have to input your personal details.\u00a0 I did not follow the directions properly.\u00a0 I\u2019m six-one.\u00a0 That\u2019s what I put into my profile\u20146.1 which the phone translated into 6.1 inches.\u00a0 That first day I walked a lot.\u00a0 Bill and I took the same number of steps, but my distance barely registered.\u00a0 No wonder.\u00a0 The phone thought I was Bella\u2019s size.\u00a0 When Bill entered my inches properly, the distance statistics began to make better sense.<\/p>\n
The next morning, when I came down the hall to start the coffee what did I see at the end of the hallway?\u00a0 A stairway.\u00a0 The stairway to upstairs, a place we seldom go.\u00a0 We used the upstairs during the renovations after our great flood, but since then?\u00a0 Not so much.\u00a0 So I looked at those stairs and thought about them.\u00a0 Then while the coffee was brewing, I went back to the stairs and climbed up\u2014well dragged myself up.\u00a0 And since the coffee machine was still brewing when I came down, I did it again.\u00a0 Quite a bit slower the second time, but when I checked on my dashboard, there it was\u20142 Flights Climbed. YAY!<\/p>\n
That first day, I made four flights and a little over a mile, and I\u2019ve been gradually upping those numbers, walking in the back yard or the front driveway.\u00a0 The front driveway lap amounts to just over 100 steps.\u00a0 I can walk away from my writing chair, do twenty laps in about twenty minutes, and voila, I have 2000 plus steps\u2014and a down payment on that day\u2019s mileage.\u00a0 Without ever leaving home or wearing spandex.<\/p>\n
When I was in the insurance business, my Agency Manager, Gilbert F. Lawson, often repeated the following words: “Know the score; keep the score; report the score.\u00a0 The score will improve.”\u00a0 That\u2019s why, when I\u2019m writing, I always count the words.\u00a0 I need to know if I\u2019m making forward progress<\/p>\n
The same thing is true for this.\u00a0 I\u2019ve just checked my score, and my monthly averages are as follows:\u00a0 Distance daily: 2.37 miles; Steps daily: 4,636; Flights climbed daily: 13. But that\u2019s the average.\u00a0 Yesterday I clocked in at 9,000 steps, 5 miles, and 20 flights climbed.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s a big change for me.\u00a0 And it\u2019s a big change for Bill, too.\u00a0 His legs are shorter than mine, so if he takes the same number of steps, they don\u2019t add up to the same mileage.<\/p>\n
My ultimate goal is to walk 5 miles a day, and the last two days I\u2019ve done that.<\/p>\n
So we\u2019re doing it.\u00a0 We\u2019re doing it at home.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have a Stair-master, but we do have stairs.\u00a0 Every time I start the coffee machine, that\u2019s where I go\u2014up and down the stairs.\u00a0 As for having to make pit stops?\u00a0 Those happen in one of the upstairs bathrooms, too, not here on the ground floor.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re also tackling this problem together and we\u2019re doing it rain or shine, Bella included.\u00a0 By the way, she really is 6.1 inches tall.<\/p>\n
Now, once this blog is in the can it\u2019s time for a new cup of coffee and at least two flights of stairs.<\/p>\n
If I can do it, so can you.<\/p>\n
And remember, keeping track of whatever it is you\u2019re trying to accomplish really does make a huge difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Years ago a fan sent me an e-mail complaining about the name of one of the characters in the first Walker Family book, Hour of the Hunter.\u00a0 The character\u2019s name was Fat Crack Ortiz, and my correspondent wanted to know why I gave him that name.\u00a0 I was a bit perplexed about how to respond, […]<\/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":[40,135,134],"class_list":["post-925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","tag-bella","tag-exercise","tag-walking"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-eV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925","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=925"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":927,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925\/revisions\/927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}