Walking Goals

At the beginning of this year I set different exercise goals on my list to accomplish in 2020. One of them was to walk 1010 miles.

You maybe ask: “How did you arrive at that number?”. Well 2020 miles sounded a bit to overwhelming and not really feasible. Hence I just divided in 2 and that comes down to about 3 miles a day. So something that should be doable.

I only occasionally reach 10 000 steps a day, but on a regular work day with going to/from the car park both when leaving home and going to work I average about 6500 steps. With the occasional hike in the weekend I would reach my goal. However due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m working from home. So those steps are not reached anymore. The weekend hikes were either organized walks found on https://www.walkinginbelgium.be or walks at the beach, the Ardennes or something thrown together from the walking network app https://www.wandelknooppunt.be/routeplanner.

The Corona measures included suspension of events, so all organized walks on that website are cancelled till September. Until around mid-May we couldn’t take the car for leisure activities only for necessities and only since June 8th can we go on single or multiple day excursions in Belgium. All this combined with social distancing limited my walking drastically.

At times when walking in the neighborhood I sometimes felt that others didn’t really respected the 6 feet distance and especially when a biker came from the opposite direction I felt that my private space was invaded. This took the joy out of walking for me.

I’m also pretty picky concerning the weather, when they predict rain, it’s raining or it’s too hot, you won’t find me outside walking. I know that I won’t melt from a bit of water, like Elphaba in the Wizard of Oz, but I just can’t get motivated go outside in these circumstances.

Of course the above doesn’t need to be an excuse for not walking. Leslie Sansone has very good 1 to 5 mile walks on Youtube or on the “Walk at Home” app. You don’t need much space and they aren’t boring at all. Admittingly I only did one or two of these video’s during lockdown. As the summer heat is creeping in my house I’m sweating heavily just sitting at my desk (probably need to adjust my Thyroid medication), so I’m not really encouraged to workout indoors at the moment.

We’re almost half way through the year and I’m only 252.7 miles in. Hopefully I can catch up when live “normalizes” a bit more. Oh how do I miss a good beach walk.

I track my miles with my Fitbit. I have a Fitbit Versa that has a good battery life of about 4 days that is water resistance and I wear almost constantly. The app is connected to the yes.fit website and app on my android phone as well as to the World Walking app. The first one is a paying service. You pay either per virtual race you enter, or you pay a monthly or yearly fee. When you are a member and pay the monthly or yearly fee it is not mandatory that you choose a reward. Most of the time you can chose between a medal or a t-shirt as a reward. So far I finished “The Tortoise Creep” a virtual race of 155.1 miles (started in 2019) and have still 3.3 miles to go to complete the 153.4 miles “Texas Hill Country” race. During those races you pass by mile markers that can be quotes, little titbits of information or a place of interest. When you pass those markers you are notified of this via email. In your profile you find the overall stats and the year to date stats. The fact that all is automated, you just have to link your tracker and chose your race and the system keeps track of your total mileage and you get the mile markers by email make it very easy and fun.

The World Walking app is free and also lets you make virtual  walks in cities, regions, countries, or from country to country. However here you have the add the steps manually to your race and you aren’t notified when you pass a milestone. I haven’t discovered overall statistics on this app yet. So far I completed a walk trough Bologna, Italy and am currently walking the road from St Michael’s Mount (Cornwall, England) to his French counterpart Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy. This last walk is 737 miles so this will form the biggest part to reach my goal in this app.

Fitbit also has some virtual races in their app, and when I just had my first Fitbit I finished them all. It seems that in the beginning there were more as I earned badges for the NYC 3.1 miles, 10 miles and 26.2 miles back in 2018.

I hope the weather and the environment will inspire a lot of lovely hikes, so I can reach my goal. Please let me know where you love to hike or walk, is it the forest, the beach or in the city?