My morning constitutional

Inspired by Erin’s tales about how she has become known as the crazy running woman of her neighborhood I thought I’d post a little piece on my own training regime – my three mile morning constitutional.

It’s not really training in the strictest sense of the word, but it did start out that way. A few months before setting off on this June’s fifty odd mile walk of the Cumbria Way I realized that I hadn’t done any hiking in about a year. Fearing that my legs might swell up and my toes drop off if exposed to sudden onset of prolonged exercise I figured I had better get some practice in.

Unfortunately, like many of the people reading this, there are some pretty hefty demands on my time. If I’m not working then I’m generally looking after the kids and so there aren’t that many opportunities for lengthy strolls. in fact I worked out that the only time I could carve out for myself would in the morning before everyone got up.

And so with a steely grimace I set my alarm for 5:50am and resolved to get a good hours walking in at the start of each day. With hills and everything.

And amazingly I’ve never looked back. Not only did these morning constitutionals prepare me very well for the rigors of the Cumbria Way, but I found I really enjoyed them too. What’s more my mood drastically improved as well. For years I’ve been telling my patients that moderate daily exercise has been clinically proven to be as an effective mood lifter as both anti-depressants and therapy; but now I actually believe it too. It’s bloody marvelous stuff.

Of course it does help that the area in which I live is rather beautiful. Especially just after sunrise when there are few others about.

I took the camera out with me this morning to take some illustrative pictures; but unfortunately the battery ran out within ten minutes from my house. I kept taking it out and rubbing it vigorously, and so managed to get a few shots off; but I couldn’t play with the knobs as much as I usually like to do and so the results aren’t as satisfying as I’d like (you have no idea how much the 14 year old boy in me enjoyed writing that sentence.)

I must admit don’t walk every single morning, sometimes the gravitational pull of the pillow is too great to resist. And I’m not too sure what I’m going to do in the winter when everything is dark (the local gym/pool doesn’t open early enough to go there, and I’m not too keen on walking country lanes with no street lights. So I’m not convinced that all this walking will actually prepare me for Hadrian’s Walk in any way as there is likely to be a hefty gap in my exercise.

But as long as I get back into the swing of it when the mornings become lighter again I should be OK, or at least that’s what past experience has told me.

If not then the rest of you can just take turns carrying me. The way I figure it, it’s the least you can do.

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This post is cross posted from the hadrianswalk.org blog. If you’d like to leave a comment (go on, you know you want to) then I’d really appreciate it if you did it there instead of on All That Comes With It as I’m trying to raise the Walk’s blog’s profile at the moment.Sorry if you’ve read this over there already, I won’t be doing this with all my Walk related posts.

And while you’re at it you might as well add hadrianswalk.org’s feed to your feedreader too. There are a bunch of great bloggers publishing over there and things are just starting to get swinging.

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Related posts:

1. A morning constitutional
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3. On Wagons: falling off and getting back on