I used to be more active than I’ve been in recent years. I have (had?) a friend who occasionally introduces me as “a keen hillwalker”, which I don’t think was accurate even in my most regular walking days. But I’d realised how inactive I’d become and so in 2019 I signed up to twelve monthly walking challenges and twelve monthly swimming challenges, just to get me up.
That worked ok. I had to swim 2-3 times a month and I generally walked about 10km a month. I earned twelve medals too and I’m particularly proud of the golden June swimming one because that was when I doubled my swimming distance. But twenty-five virtual medal events in a year is an expensive way of bribing yourself to get moving and so in 2020, I signed up to just one: walk, run, swim and/or cycle 500km in a year.
I’ll be honest, bear cubs. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I probably wouldn’t have achieved it.
I drew up a spreadsheet, because if you slice open my brain, you’ll find the cells in there are Excel cells. 500km a year is just over 40km a month. I did 2.5km a month of swimming in 2019, give or take doubling it in June and October, so I noted that in my Swimming column and then I divided the remaining 470km for walking into 12, rounded it up to a nice clean 40km a month and finished up with a total target of 42.5km a month. That adds up to a little more than 500km but it was the best I could do with roundish numbers.
January started well. I was in Switzerland over New Year and managed to get 33km of walking in, at least according to my GPS. I did my target swims and I also started Couch to 5K, which required me to add a running column. I ended January less than 1.5km short of my target.
But February wasn’t so good. I did my swimming and I did some running but… no, February was not illustrious. 24km short. The swimming wasn’t so bad. I ordered myself a 1 mile and a 2000m swimming badge, like I got when I was younger and successfully achieved both and therefore the right to sew them on my blanket.
And then March came along – when the plague really hit and we went into lockdown – and it was was catastrophic. I managed 6.24km in the entire month.
But then it was April and I began to join my parents on their regular walks around the rec. I couldn’t swim and I abandoned the running but nonetheless I hit and then surpassed my 42.5km target with walking alone.
In May, I decided I was going to walk every day without fail (as opposed to the mere 25 out of 30 days I walked in April!) and I also decided it wasn’t worth going outside if I didn’t do at least 2km a day. As I write this, it’s October 11th and I still haven’t missed a single day. Come rain or shine, I’ve walked 2km every day for more than five months. No days off. Sometimes it’s more. In fact, during the second half of May, I began to realise that I could make up what I missed in January to March if I made my walks just a bit longer. 2.8km a day and I could go into June all caught up. And of course, they were longer. Strava only measured to one decimal place at the time. A 2.8km walk became 2.9 just in case. Interesting walks went on longer for their own sake. By May 31st, I only needed to walk 70 metres to be caught up and I went into June very proudly with 42.5km for each of the preceding five months under my feet.
In August, my local open air pool opened. Fresh air and a vat of disinfectant. I knew it would close for the winter by September so I took to swimming twice a week. Each session was an hour and I swam. For seven or eight weeks, I gradually saw my stamina and speed increase and in the confines of strictly one hour only, my distances became bigger than last year. Where I’d often only swim 40 lengths, or get tired and bored by 30 or regard it as a big achievement to get to 50, I swam a minimum of 53 average normal-pool lengths every session this summer, although in reality it was 60 lengths because this isn’t an average normal-pool length, it’s a little shorter. Just out of interest, my average swim has gone up from 39 minutes in 2019 to 58 minutes in 2020, and the average distance has gone up close enough 50%, from an average 1km to 1.5km. Average speed hasn’t actually increased much worth noting, oddly.
By the time it closed, I’d swum 11.1 months’ worth of my 2020 target. My arms were getting tired by mid-September and they’re probably glad of the rest but my legs often feel stiff and crampy these days. I’m not ready for the grubby humid enclosed atmosphere of an indoor pool just yet, though.
As I said, I kept up my daily 2km walks. They add up. I did 95km in May and I average 75-80 in a month when I’m not playing catch-up. I watched my actual distance creep over my budget target distance and then leave it in the dust and on September 11th, I wrote down a daily walk that tipped my total over the magic 500km.
I’d never have got into regular walking if we hadn’t been locked down with one hour outside for exercise. If the pool wasn’t taken away, I’d never have swum 13km in a single month. I wouldn’t be receiving a huge medal in the post at all, never mind by the middle of September.
It’s amazing! It’s enormous and really shiny and the middle spins so the footsteps run round it. I’d expected to be underwhelmed by the medal itself but it’s just so big! That’s a walk every day, hanging around my neck. That’s those twice-weekly swims. That’s the attempt to take up running.
Next year’s medals are pretty. I’m aiming for 500 miles next year, although I’ll still have to count and submit in kilometres – 805 of them. I can definitely do that. 500km was easier than I expected and as of today, my spreadsheet says I’ve done 602.44km. And maybe in 2022, when the world is a bit more normal, I’ll even go for 1000km.
Regular exercise, by the way, hasn’t made much visual difference to me. I wish I even had “a sort of alchemy had taken place under the flesh and skin”. It would be nice to look a bit fitter. But I must be fitter. It must have done my heart and lungs some good. The doctor told me to do “weight bearing exercise, like walking” so it must have done my bone strength some good. It’s not done my tendons much good. I’m worse at walking up hills than ever because they’re ever more ready to tighten and tense and hurt. And I think I had a stress fracture of one of my toes backalong, although it’s been fine in recent months.
But it can’t be bad for me to have gained an exercise routine during the plague and I’m very proud of the big medal.