Tag: walking

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I have been meaning for a while to write about how I seem to need more recovery from exercise now than I did five or six years ago. Back in 2020 I could do a hard workout one day, take one rest day, and then come back and do another hard workout. This year I seem to need more rest days to recover. A couple of times recently, I seemed to need six days to recover from a hard lifting session or a long run.

When I mentioned this to my family I got back a chorus of variations on “Getting old sucks.” And it is entirely possible that my recovery capability took a dramatic hit between age 60 and 66. But I didn’t want to just assume that it was aging. I wanted to see if I could figure out if that was actually true.

(I mean, I know that there are a bunch of other changes between than and now that might make a difference in how much recovery time I need. One is that I walk my dog a lot. Although I don’t count those walks as “workouts,” they are still physical activity that requires some amount of recovery. I didn’t have a dog in 2020. I walked plenty then too, but I didn’t go for a long walk every day. Probably only once a week did I walk as far as I do almost every day now. Another is that now I’m trying to train for sword fighting. Those training sessions aren’t usually extremely intense, but sometimes they are, and they’re also somewhat unpredictable, meaning I can’t always line those sessions up with days when I’m ready for a hard workout. Plus, they’re fun—which makes it much easier to end up overdoing it.)

Fortunately, I have my workout logs from 2020—starting right before the pandemic, when I rediscovered the fact that consistency beats intensity when it comes to exercise, and then from the couple of years after that, when the ongoing pandemic meant that I didn’t have to do anything else, and could just exercise as much as I wanted.

I have at least two ideas about things I might do to analyze this:

  1. Look at the logs. Is what I’m trying to do now (that seems to take so much recovery) more than what I was doing then?
  2. Replicate those workouts. An experiment I could do is just take a few weeks and do roughly the same workouts I did back in 2020. If that goes well, then maybe my recover capabilities haven’t gotten worse. Maybe I’m just doing harder workouts. Or anyway, workouts that are harder to recover from

So, I did take a first look at those logs, looking to see how much exercise I was doing for the first 30 or so weeks starting right before the pandemic, and how much recovery I was getting. I remember thinking at the time that I should aim for a workout every other day, accepting the reality that I’d occasionally miss a day, and end up hitting about three times a week, which seemed like a good goal. It turns out that, during this period of initial consistency, I was getting in almost three workouts per week as intended: 2.89 ± 0.83 workouts. The numbers showed a slight upward trend, with a few weeks with 4 workouts and almost none with just 2 in the last few weeks.

Me doing a kettlebell swing

So that’s a first thing to try: Exercising roughly every other day, rather than overdoing it for several days and then needing several days to recover.

Every-other-day isn’t the only good workout schedule. Since I like working out, I kind of like exercising almost every day. Separately from that test, maybe I can come up with a six-day-a-week schedule that doesn’t overdo it: Just one or two exercises per day, focusing on different muscles, different body parts, and different energy systems from one day to the next.

I have so many things to try! (Along with trying not to overdo it.)

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I walk a lot. Because I have a dog, and want to be sure my dog gets the exercise it needs, I take a truly inordinate number of steps per day. (Wait just a moment while I check my Fitbit…) Last week I averaged 14,036 steps per day. The previous week I averaged 17,197 steps per day. Those weeks are quite typical for me; I don’t average much under 15,000 unless I’m sick or the weather’s really bad.

So, when I saw the news recently that walking “3,000 to 5,000 steps per day can help to stave off mental decline,” I’m like, “Okay? Great.” Taking 5,000 to 7,500 steps per day seems to stave off Alzheimer’s disease by around seven years.

I mean, that’s great. Staving off Alzheimer’s disease by 7 years would probably cut the incidence of the disease by close to half (because people would die of something else first).

But really? I mean, yes, my inordinate walking takes a lot of time that most people don’t have. Back when I was working a regular job I’d try to get “enough exercise,” and that generally topped out at an average of a little over 100 minutes per day—and that much only in the summer, and that high only because I’d average in a 3 or 4 hour bike ride over the weekend. Now I probably spend close to 150 minutes per day just walking the dog. I recognize that almost nobody’s got time for that.

And, yes, walking in particular depends on capabilities that not everyone has. Lots of people old enough to worry about Alzheimer’s have bad knees or bad hips or bad feet or bad hearts or bad lungs. Maybe their endurance is very low. Maybe their balance is poor enough that walking is a risk.

But it doesn’t need to be walking. Walking is just easy to measure with a wearable device. Any sort of exercise will do the trick. Lift weights. (They don’t have to be heavy weights, as long as they’re heavy for you.) Ride a bike. Ride a stationary bike. Row. Use a rowing machine. Play almost any sport. Dance the night away.

Related to this, only in terms of how low the bar is set to do an enormous amount of good, a different study looked at whether walks needed to be long in order to provide the benefits, or whether cobbling together a number of shorter walks to add up to the same number of steps was just as good. It turns out longer walks are better. (Risk of being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease within 9.5 years dropped from 13% to around 4–8%.) But the dividing line in the study was that walks of at least 10–15 minutes counted as “long” walks, versus short walks of less then 5 minutes.

If you can walk 5 minutes, I’ll wager you can work up to walking 15 minutes in a very short period of time. And the evidence is now pretty clear that it’s worth doing.

Get some exercise. The bar is pretty low for making a big difference.

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I was busy most of the day. In the morning I took Jackie to her (last!) physical therapy appointment, and in the afternoon I had my usual Thursday visit with some former co-workers. But in the early evening (after fourth dog walk) I sat down and wrote a few hundred words. I’ve also updated the progress tracker in the sidebar. (And, if you’re reading it, wrote this brief post on my day’s progress.)

Three things I should do soon (they’re on my schedule for “before November 1st”): Write a logline, short synopsis, and long synopsis for the story. I don’t know that I need to do all three, but I should definitely do some thinking about what the story is about before I spend much more time writing.

Probably just the sort of thinking to do tomorrow while walking the dog.

A black dog looking just a bit supercilious sitting on a bed
Ashley, the dog in question.

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I’ve started generating prose for my NaNo 2.0 story, despite the fact that starting early is supposed to be against the rules.

I figure it’s okay because I’m not really trying to write the story yet. I’m just capturing some text to use to validate things like the NaNo 2.0 progress bar, which should now be visible in my sidebar, below my short profile, and above the form for subscribing to my newsletter.

I’m not sure the progress bar is working yet. It looks kind of minimal, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t written much yet. By the time NaNo 2.0 goes live on November 1st, it should be clear that it’s working.

Besides writing, I’m making notes about how the story is supposed to go. I don’t really have an outline yet, but I’m capturing internal details about the story world as I figure them out.

And I’m figuring it out while I’m walking. Mostly while I’m walking the dog.

I’ve always done some of my best thinking about stories while walking. The past three years or so, I’ve done less such thinking, for two reasons: The dog, and podcasts.

Ashley, especially as a younger dog, was kind of hard to walk. She was a little too likely to lunge growling and snarling at people. (Too often she acts like she’s a very good dog until she jumps on someone, so people want to meet her, and then get booped in the nose with Ashley’s snout.) So I’ve really had to be very alert to people coming within reach, to make sure nothing bad happened.

That made it harder to think about other stuff while I was walking Ashley.

I’ve also been listening to podcasts, which I rather enjoy, but which also lead to less thinking about stories while I’m walking.

So, between Ashley behaving much better these days, and cutting back on podcast listening, my walks are turning back into an excellent opportunity for plotting.

I’m very pleased with the results so far.

A black dog with a white chest sitting in the grass in a park
This dog will boop you in the nose with her snout

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For years I worried a lot about daily routines. (Just click on the tag for “daily routine” and you can find literally dozens of posts on the topic.) Of late, that seems to no longer be the case. It’s been years since I posted on the topic.

A few days ago though, my brother mentioned me in a toot on daily routines, which prompted me to wonder what my current daily routine actually looks like. Turns out, I do have a daily routine, that I stick to pretty well (with minor adjustments for errands, medical appointments, etc.).

Unsurprisingly, it’s rather sun-aligned.

Sunrise through thin clouds viewed across Dohme Park

(6:00 AM) I get up around dawn, which is at different times at different parts of the year, but is around 6:00 AM right now. I drink a (ginormous) mug of coffee (or two). I spend some time dicking around on the internet, check my social media feeds, chat on-line with my brother, and get an update on our mom (who lives with him). I also check my Oura ring, to see how well I slept. (That’s a joke. Of course I know how well I slept. But the information my Oura ring provides is nevertheless sometimes valuable.) We usually do the Jumble via chat during this time as well.

(6:40 AM) Around sunrise I take the dog for her first walk of the day. That’s been around 6:45 lately, but is getting earlier every day just now.

(7:00 AM) After first-walk I might have a third cup of coffee, but I proceed to fixing and then eating breakfast.

(8:00 AM) After breakfast it’s time for the dog’s second walk. This is the long walk of the day. In bad weather it might also be just 20 minutes, but is usually at least 40 minutes, and in really nice weather might be an 90 minutes or longer.)

(9:00 AM) Once I get home from second walk, I proceed to my morning exercises, which I ought to be able to do in 20 minutes or so, but which often stretches out to twice that long. I’m working to shorten it, so I have some hope of getting something else done during the day.

(9:30 AM) After morning exercises (which is really a stretching/flexibility/mobility routine), I proceed to my workout, unless it’s a rest day. That takes 40 minutes to an hour.

Since I started drafting this post three or four days ago, I’ve been tracking the start and end times of my morning exercises and my workouts, with an eye toward collapsing the total time for this stuff down to the 60–80 minutes that it should be. If I can do that, I should be able to finish no later than 10:30, which should give me most of three hours available to get work done, before I need to break for the main meal of the day.

(10:30 AM) Get work done!

(1:00 PM) Jackie and I have moved our main meal of the day to 1:00 PM or 2:00 PM, which provides just a bit more flexibility for getting work done in the morning (although that time gets used up if I need to run an errand, or if I’m fixing lunch that day). Ashley usually gets her third walk of the day either right before or right after lunch.

I generally don’t even try to get anything useful done after that. I might take a nap. I might read. I might spend some more time dicking around on the internet. Just lately, I’ve been trying to get a backup server configured so that my brother and I can backup our backups to each other’s servers, meaning that we’ll have off-site backups.

(4:15 PM) At 4:15 PM we have our cocktail hour call with Steven and my mom. We’ve all cut back on alcohol consumption, so we usually drink water rather than a cocktail, but we’re sticking with the call. It means I get to talk to my mom nearly every day.

(4:45 PM) After cocktail hour I take Ashley for her fourth (and now, finally, last) walk of the day. When she was a puppy I had to take her for eight walks a day (to keep her from peeing in the floor). That ramped down pretty quickly to seven and then six, but it took a long time to get her down to five and then four. But this is actually much more convenient for me, as well as being enough walking for both of us. (I average over 12,000 steps a day, even in the winter. In the summer it’s more like 15,000.)

(5:30 PM) After fourth-walk I usually sit down to watch some video entertainment with Jackie, or else read some more.

Jackie goes to bed quite early most days, a remnant from her days working at the bakery (when she had to get up at 4:00 AM).

I generally like to go to bed a couple of hours after sunset, although not that early in mid-winter nor that late in high summer. Just lately I’ve been aiming to take Ashley out of the patio for one last peeing opportunity in time for me to get to bed around 9:00 PM.

There’s some variability, of course. Mondays I do Esperanto in the early evening. Wednesdays there’s (just recently) a gentlemen’s lunch. Thursdays there lunch with some former coworkers, that’s been going on in some form or another for decades now. Sunday afternoons (and when I’m feeling fit enough, Tuesday and Thursday evenings) there’s sword fighting.

As I said above, the main value of this post to me seems to be around how I might get my warmup and workout done more compactly. I think I’ll write about that soon, and if I do, I’ll link to it here.