It is amazing how much moving around and sunlight can boost your mood. For the past two years, I have lived in Belgium. Belgium has its own shade of grey, and it makes the winters brutal. Right now, I am in Arona, a small city in the Piedmont region around Lago Maggiore—I guess the translation would be Major Lake or Maggiore Lake. I am a bit too lazy today to look that up.
But today, in my quest to start getting back on track with my health, I took Ig for a two-and-a-half-hour walk.
Even my easing back in and my walking are extreme.
It felt amazing.
Normally, when I walk Ig, I do not listen to podcasts or music. I try to keep that as an offline time of my day so I can be present, in the moment, and just spend time with her. But this is exam season and I am procrastinating enough as it is so for this walk, I put on a couple of my recorded lessons and listened to them while we walked. It was marvelous.
As I mentioned last night, I have spent a lot of time sitting. And as they say, sitting is the new smoking—and that was before the lockdown where we at least had to get up, walk to a form of transportation, and eventually walk into our place of work. Now, we don’t even have to get out of bed to do anything other than eat, use the bathroom, and occasionally shower. We have to go out of our way to find excuses or motivation to move.
Lately, I have found all the reasons available not to. Now, all of that is changing. Tomorrow, I have decided to take it up a notch, and we will go for a short run to the nearby park and run as much as possible there then walk the rest. If we are feeling up for it, then we can run back—which should be much easier since I think the way there will be uphill.
We’ll see how far we—I—make it with this whole running thing.
I am also enjoying stretching. I have not even hit thirty yet, and I am already thinking about my mobility later in life. It sounds a bit absurd when I put it in those terms and that is part of the problem.
Worrying about your mobility is like worrying about your retirement. None of us know what our future will look like:
- Will I retire?
- Will I live that long?
- Will climate change destroy the planet or at least humanity before I have to worry about these things
None of us know.
But by not preparing for retirement and not worrying about mobility, we are limiting the options available to us in the future.
Therefore, today, I worry about saving money for retirement, and today, I worry about my mobility.
I have been doing some hip and shoulder exercises since those are the areas I am always tightest. Today I will venture into more of the knee ankle area—if that is a thing. I haven’t looked into that part yet.
I have also been enjoying getting back into more body-weight exercises. They are very short and simple to keep me going while I have too many other things I am trying to do at this moment. As I establish a more stable routine, I will get into a set regimen, which will be nice.