The Training Walk: Beginning

There is no Sewing Report this month because I haven’t had any time to sew. Well, there was that one project, but it mostly proved that I still need lots of practice at re-sizing patterns. Feh. And since next month is November, I will be giving over my Tuesday blog posts to The Dark Side of the Fridge, where I will do a month-long tutorial on how to plan and cook Thanksgiving Dinner.

I’m also starting a new section of the blog (as you can see above) called The Training Walk. This is because I am embarking on yet another new project and as my coach suggested, it might be a good idea to journal/blog my experiences. I’m not quite ready to reveal just yet why I’m doing all this training and blogging and what not. One reason is obvious – if I don’t meet my goal it will be pretty embarrassing, and truth be told, that has only been an incentive to give up sooner rather than later. Secondly, I just read somewhere that people who tell everyone what their big plans are seldom follow through. Apparently, telling everyone what you’re going to do is psychologically close enough to actually doing it.

What I will say is that I have a very specific goal in mind and for it to happen, I have to start training now. Well, I started last week. My key goal is consistency – which has never been numbered among my virtues. I have to say, though, having such a visible goal, namely something I’ve been wanting to do since I was in my 20s, is really helping me get off my backside. I think the other thing that’s helping is that we are starting really slowly. So slowly, in fact, that I blew past my mileage goal, if I count all the extra steps I took cleaning the garage and getting to the doctor’s office and running around the L.A. As Subject Archives Bazaar last Saturday. It was an unusually active week for me and if you only count my actual workouts, I only went over my goal by just under a mile.

I do walk an awful lot already since my husband and I don’t own a car (we rent when we need one). I asked my coach if she thought I should count some of the walking I do to get around in with my mileages. She thought that would make more sense – and I did that on Saturday. But I’m thinking I’ll do a little of both. I do need to do several sustained walks, as opposed to walk a little ways here, sit down, then walk there, sit down, like I would getting on a bus or the train. But given my schedule, it would probably help to integrate my workouts with getting from point A to point B at times. I’ve discovered I’m more likely to work out when I can integrate it in with whatever I’m doing on a given day.

There is no doubt, however, that I overdid it last week. Call it two days of cleaning the garage, and I probably could have started counting my workout a lot sooner in my running around on Friday. Still, I was up and walking this morning and I walked every day except Sunday last week. We’ll see what happens.