Walk in Her Shoes – Training Update

It’s now less than 3 weeks to the start of the Walk in Her Shoes Challenge on 16 March. I’ve signed up for the “Gold” level, which is 20,000 steps a day – the same as I signed up for last year.

Before I signed up I’d set myself a 15,000-step goal each day, but I wasn’t achieving it very often. I decided to lower my expectations (I know. This is unheard of, right?) and drop it back to 12,000 steps. Not only that, I made it an average daily step count over a week, rather than an absolute goal. So all I really wanted to make sure I did was a minimum of 10,000 steps a day, which seems to be the generally agreed minimum for reasonable health.

I think reducing the target helped, because instead of every day having nothing in the “step goal” box and feeling miserable about that, most days I’d have a tick in there, which then made me feel a whole lot more positive. That encouraged me to increase the target once I’d started achieving it regularly.

Since then I’ve gradually built up my daily step target. This week I’m aiming for 19,000 steps a day, which is just 1,000 fewer steps than my Walk in Her Shoes Challenge goal. So far, 3 days in, I’ve done it reasonably easily (if getting up at 5am to go for a walk is ever easy*), so I’m already looking ahead to my 25,000 step “stretch goal”.

In the mean time . . .

While I was doing walks at lunchtime, when it’s relatively warm and I need to have some water, I got really annoyed by my shoulder bag flapping against me as I was walking.

I thought it would be great to have some kind of holster thing that I could strap to my leg and have easy, non-flappy, access to my water bottle. Most of the solutions I found online seemed excessively expensive and hard-core for what I needed, but after an extensive search of sports shops and outdoor shops in Hobart I found a reasonable compromise without the hefty price tag.

20150216 Water holster

I set a new personal best. Yay.

20150214 Walk data

I saw a beautiful sunrise in Bacchus Marsh.

20150222-02 Sunrise

I did my longest walk since my 12.2 km walk last year.

20150222-08 Longest walk so far this year

I’ve been battling blisters that haven’t been sure whether they are blisters or callouses. It’s been rather painful to walk the last week or so. I got all the anti-blister things to try and sort this out once and for all.

20150223 All the blister things IG

The latest recommendation from the chemist has been these, with paw paw to soften the callouses. Note “actual size”.

IMG_0127

And finally, I was interviewed by our local paper about participating in the challenge, and they sent a photographer out to take some photos of me walking to go with the article. Some of the photos were very silly, so I’m sure one of those will be what they’ll use if they go ahead with the story. Please don’t laugh at me if you see it.

OK. 19,000 steps. Focus. Walk. Try to go to bed a bit earlier.

 

 

* It isn’t.

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