|<<    <<     JUNE     >>    >>|

June 2013

09:57 01/06/2013 Saturday...

Last weekend in Wales...

A few nights ago a test walk with a new pack...

Last night a short walk in the evening...

18:38 09/06/2013 Sunday afternoon...

Just been for a long walk down towards the river. Two hours, so I guess that's about 10km. Through brown fields of dry grass, fields of long green grass, along a canal towpath, through cool woods on a carpet of last autumn's dry leaves over bare earth, through a meadow of wild flowers, yellows and purples, across a river, along the river through fields of sheep and short cropped grass, and back through the village. A long phone conversation with my sister for the first part and then in silence. Perfect weather.

I think walking does work as exercise. I feel that same sense of 'having exercised' that I feel after running, but I feel it much later. I'm told that it takes the same number of calories to cover a given distance whether you are running or walking. I find that after about 20 minutes of running I start to feel more energetic and start to feel like I want to exert myself a bit. If I'm walking I find that same response after about an hour.

It's all good. I don't feel quite ready to run yet. My knees and ankles and feet are not feeling strong enough, ...not both of them anyway, and you kind of need both. Walking will be fine. It's not like I don't have the time at the moment. Walking will also strengthen my legs and iron out all the aches and pains in them. I have a hunch that the worst thing for my legs is sitting. Too much sitting. But some progress is being made. I feel a litle bit fitter than I did a month ago.

For a few years now I've had the ambition of entering a 10km race event. It's not that far - not like a marathon - but still, for me, it's far enough to be a challenge. I had thought I would train by running shorter distances and building up the distance to 10km that way, but perhaps I could start at 10km and build up the speed until I can run the whole distance at a racy pace. I like the idea of finding some 10km circular routes from my house and using them in different ways, so I can walk them fast or slow, in soft shoes or in walking boots, with or without a rucksack, with or without walkng poles, even run some of the way... That way, I can enter a 10km race, and if I need to walk half of it, I walk half of it. I seem to remember someone saying that a half marathon they were thinking of entering had a cut-off time of four hours, after which one would be disqualified. A half marathon, which is about 21km, can be completed at a brisk walk in four hours, so even that would be possible too.

20:52 19/06/2013 Wednesday evening...

Not been talking much lately. I have not been running at all, as I feel too weak and too heavy to run safely or comfortably. I have been walking quite regularly. Also, I have been doing some daily exercises in an attempt to get gradually stronger.

It always takes a while for the effects of exercise to show of course, but now, after a few weeks I am beginning to feel a little stronger. Just a little, but it is very encouraging.

The exercise programme is a modified version of an old Canadian Air Force program called 5BX, which was designed to get people back to fitness with just 11 minutes of exercise a day. I modify it, both by changing one or two of the exercises to make them feel more comfortable, and by repeating the 'strength' exercises after the jogging-on-the-spot part. So the whole thing takes me about 15 minutes in fact.

What I like about the 5BX programme is that it is gently graduated, so there is no risk of injury, and yet there is a definite sense of progress, week after week. I am already feeling less unsteady on my feet when I jog on the spot. Jumping is still not great, as my left foot and ankle feel weak, but even that has improved, and the regular stiffness in that foot is not always present now.

So, just an update. It's been over a year since I started this blog and progress has been up-and-down, with an overall downward slant I have to say, but really that's not the point. It is enough to try every day.

Almost certainly, trying every day will result in some definite improvement in my fitness level, but in the end I'm going to get old and die so that game of improvement is one I will ultimately lose in any case. What matters is not the improvement but the daily effort. If I had not made the effort I have made over the past year then for sure I would be even more unfit than I am now, with all the health risks associated with that, so it has certainly not been a waste of time.

And now it seems I have given up the idea of jogging - for the time being at least - and that may make my choice of domain name (joggerslog.co.uk) a bit unfortunate, but there it is. Now it's a walkers log.

22:08 19/06/2013 ... As it is a year since I started this I am doing a little reviewing, in various ways. One thing is the blog itself. It's definitely useful for me to see the kind of progress or lack of progress I have been making over the year, and it's still interesting for me to carry on with it.

I had thought that perhaps it would be better to simplify the site so that I dispense with the NOW page and just have monthly pages instead. This would mean there is much less to update every month. The file that loads first (named index.htm) would change its title and its function every month to become the current month's page, and the old index.htm file would be re-named for the previous month. The other pages would (almost) not have to change at all, as they would only have to point to the previous month's page in the way they always had and also to the following month's page. At present I have to (or should) transfer yesterday's post to the current month's page every time I make a new entry. In practice I don't do that every time, and the NOW page does say "latest posts" (i.e. plural) so it's not really a big deal if I leave a few recent posts in there, but still it's a lot of copying and pasting, and then even more to do at the end of each month. Hmmm... I have a feeling it is better to just leave this blog site just as it is and put up with the extra little bit of work involved. For my next blog site I may do things differently, but for this one, I'll leave it as it is. OK, sorry for the public display of decision-making there, but the decision is made. I carry on as before and the site stays as it is.

As for the decision to use plain old HTML rather than using Wordpress, I have no regrets. I've been writing another blog on a wordpress.com site and although it is definitely useable, it is much easier to make updates offline and then clickety-clicky, upload the changed files via ftp. It's much snappier than waiting for Wordpress to do its thing. Well, all-in-all about the same, given that with Wordpress there's no coding to do or saving of files. Both systems have their advantages.

TOP                      NEXT >>