Walk Journal ~ Finally

Finally! A truly beautiful day.  The thermometer in my car read 84 degrees ('way above average for this time of year) as I headed home from the tax filer's office. Having completed that odious chore for another year, I gave myself the gift of a couple of hours to get outside and walk some @CharityMiles for Nothing But Nets, a charity that provides bed nets to people living in Africa to protect against malaria-carrying mosquitos.  I braced my knee which seems to be keeping it aligned (as opposed to the crazy popping that's been happening a bit) and headed out and over the highway to the lake.  The 84 degrees felt absolutely like I was being wrapped in spring with a gentle breeze swirling all around.

Walk Journals ~ October 3

The seventh season begins.

It feels as though a new path is beginning.  It's the seventh season of walking.  According to my Map My Walk app, I've walked 1,375.74 in total.  Really?  Excuse me for a second; I'm taking a minute to marvel at myself.  And actually, that doesn't count the times the app malfunctioned and didn't add my miles.  Since April 2012 there's been 3 pairs of sneakers, several sizes of t-shirts and other workout wear, 4 sets of earbuds and 2 iPhone apps to help me stay motivated.

Lately, it's been a huge struggle.  First there was maybe some (self-diagnosed) sciatica and now there is some serious knee pain.  And maybe it was all tied up in my knee from the beginning.  I'm sure I should be seeing someone with an actual medical background and getting some professional diagnoses.  But I'm really afraid and reverting to doing what I used to be so good at:  avoidance behavior.  Because, if I don't find out what's really going on or wrong here, maybe it will just go away.

And there's the intellectual struggle:  I know I need to find out what's up.  For my own good and to get back on track.  So that I can get back to 7-10 miles a day as opposed to 3-5 miles once or twice a week which is all I've managed in the last month or so.  But there might be some down time when I find out ... physical therapy (which I don't have much faith in, based on absolutely no first-hand experience), scary injections or something more involved.  I've never so much as broken a bone; being "laid up" would be a totally foreign experience.  So I keep putting off calling the doctor, any doctor.

These walks have meant so much to me.  They helped me regain my health in so many ways  Physically, I'm more fit than I ever dreamed I'd ever be again and although I'm not as flexible or sculpted as when I taught aerobics (many, many moons ago), I feel great.  At least until my knee gave out, I did.  Mentally, I think I have more control of my emotions, almost never have "down" days and see most of life through a pretty positive lens now.  

I've seen bits and pieces of my town up close and have discovered a lot about what a special place it is.  The tiny lakes (there are at least five of them) and the river, the ponds and wooded trails, the spring and the old canal ... they provide an ever changing backdrop that help me think, that cause me to wonder at their natural beauty and help quiet my busy mind so I can organize my thoughts.  

I've listened to hours and hours, probably days and days, of music.  I've developed a new taste for pop music that really feeds me and fills a place that was empty for a lot of years. The walking coupled with the music (and particularly the music of Gavin DeGraw, who coincidentally dropped into my life around the same time as the walking) probably saved my life.  

My last walk was on Thursday.  It was the first time in over a week that I left work in daylight and my knee felt pretty good so I  hit the road and put in 4.5 pretty slow miles, up to the pond, around the back of the park, over the wood bridge where two folks were fishing and back into town to visit with my river.  By the time I reached home again, it was pretty apparent that I'd gone a couple miles too many.  And I paid on Friday with a lovely limp and swelling that lasted through Sunday.  Stairs were a challenge all weekend long.

Late afternoon light on an early fall afternoon.

I miss it.  I miss being out there on a daily basis, sometimes even twice a day.  I miss the energy that came from being in sunlight--whether a lot or barely a glimmer--for a couple of hours a day.   I miss how I could hop out of bed in the morning.  Lately, I've gone back to dragging myself to wakefulness.  I miss being strong enough to resist my boss's bottomless bowl of chocolate.  I'm self-medicating with chocolate several times a day these last couple of weeks.  I miss being able to say "I never have fries" with that.  I got dinner from that cute little Wendy girl tonight.  Walking increased my strength in every area of my life.  And while I have plenty of resolve first thing in the morning, it rarely lasts beyond mid-morning.

The master of excuses has resurfaced and inhabits my frame and my brain once again.  Too many deadlines by day, too many evening commitments by night.  Weekends filled with events of my own choosing (some for fun, some for community service--which is also my fun, truth to be told).  Every day crammed with "things to do" and no time left over for calling doctors, shopping for  healthy food, finding alternate ways to burn calories while figuring out the knee ailment.  

There.  I know what to do.  I just have to get out and do it. 

My river with tinges of autumn beginning.

~~

Walking "apps" I love:

Map My Walk:  Measures distance, time, pace, split time, calories burned, announces your progress at each mile, can be paused, allows you to team up with friends, save routes, gives you weekly and monthly reports.

Charity Miles:  Measures distance, time and pace, can be paused.  Unique in that miles are sponsored by generous corporate and private donors.  Before walking, choose a charity from their list and watch how your miles add up.  $.25 for each mile walked goes to the charity you've chosen.  Walk for a different worthy cause each time or stick with one and support it every time.  You're walking anyway--why not walk for good?

Playlist for a Thursday afternoon:

WPLJ 95.5 radio and ...

New music from Gavin DeGraw from the album due out next week (October 15 ... Make A Move):

Best I Ever Had

Who's Gonna Save Us (video from a performance I was at, taken by my friend; my view of the stage that night)

Walk Journals ~ August 24 Ramblings

From the Franklin Road Bridge, looking east at the Franklin
Road Beach (baby beach) and the shore of Lenape Island.

The sub heading of my little space here in cyber world says I like to ramble.  If you've visited here before or if you're a friend of mine, you'll know I mean that figuratively and literally.  I tend to use a  lot of words when I write--ramblings.  And I walk--ramblings.  I walk a lot.

The walking, as some of you will recall, started with my endocrinologist explaining that one way to get diabetes under control is to exercise and she recommended walking.  The first mile I walked was a nerve-wracking tortuous slow hour of self-loathing.  But she had scared me sufficiently that I found 30 minutes or an hour every day.  In very little time I found myself looking forward to my outdoor excursions.  I began taking pictures of one spot every day--a location or scene that spoke to me for some reason each day.  The pictures began to find their way to facebook along with bits of song lyrics--whatever the music was that was moving me during that particular walk.  The River and Me is an outgrowth of those facebook postings.

A glorious sunrise.

The rambling part comes in, in part, with the stream of consciousness that goes on in my head while I'm walking.  Sometimes it's all about the music.  Sometimes it's all about the "to do" list for the day.  Sometimes I'm re-landscaping the yards of all the properties I pass (well, maybe not all of them, but I do love to help out the folks with crappy yards--if only they knew).  Early on, I needed to sit--often.  I'd bring prayer beads and take a break somewhere pretty and meditate or read the daily office off the prayer book app on my phone.

Crossing back from Lenape Island looking at the log
house and my little creamy storybook house.

View of the eastern shore of Indian Lake from the
Lenape Island bridge.

It seems I'm always walking near a body of water--either one of the lakes in town (having grown up near the Great Lakes, I use the term "lake" in New Jersey quite loosely--these are the smallest "lakes" on the planet), or one of the ponds nearby or my lovely river which I know on a pretty intimate basis having battled her inside and outside of my home on several occasions.  The walks began just after I'd finished rehabing my house following Hurricane Irene.  I love each of these little bits of water that are now thoroughly threaded through my life.  I need to visit one or several of them on a daily basis.  The water, the light on the water, the creatures that make their homes there ... it's all become like a familiar friend on whom I depend a great deal.  The walks are my equilibrium.

Today I'm walking around Indian Lake.  When I was newly married, I had a part-time job teaching aerobics at the local Y.  We had become friendly with the fitness director and her husband who lived in Denville and introduced us to this neighborhood.  This was how we came to buy our first house, a tiny, tiny cottage near the western shore of Indian Lake.  It was a short walk from the "baby beach," the shallow water beach where families with babies and toddlers like to congregate because it's so calm.  The "baby beach" is where I sat in my hideous maternity swimsuit, feeling rather like a beached whale and where I played in the sand a couple of years later with my own toddler.  It wasn't the house I wanted.  I wanted this creamy little house with the stone arch right on the water of the eastern shore.  However, by the time we were qualified for a mortgage, it was already sold.  Today it is for rent.  I still love this house. Our friends lived in the brown house next door, to the left--a little log cabin (before the current owners put on the clapboard second story).  I  loved our tiny yellow cottage too.  I'd thought there were a lot of good memories while we lived there.  Like mine, my friend's marriage also ended many years ago.


It's about three miles from my house in the center of town just behind the shopping district to the creamy little house on Indian Lake.  When I walk this way I usually walk through some of the parallel neighborhood before heading back into town.  Today I follow this route again, walking all the way past downtown, along the Rockaway River to the entrance to Lake Arrowhead before I turn for home.  In all, I do 5.5 miles on this walk.  It's not a great walk for a Saturday--I like to do 7 or 8 miles on a Saturday--but I needed to be home by 9:00.  It was a picture perfect morning ... and it was a good ramble.



Playlist for a Saturday:

Michael Franti and Spearhead, All People
Gavin DeGraw, Chariot