When the world was forced to social distance in the wake of Covid, I knew that I needed to do something with this time. Being laid up due to my Lyme Disease was still very fresh in my mind, and I didn’t want to repeat just watching the days slip by not doing anything. I knew the five weeks to flatten the curve was overly optimistic. This was going to take at least a month longer than that projection. I had no idea it would turn into the better part of two years, but then again, no one did. I wanted to feel like I’d done something with this time.
I wanted this time to matter.
It was during this time that I committed to a routine of listening to audiobooks for two hours every morning while I worked. When my tasks were menial, I could both do my job and take in a story. This is also when I jumped in headfirst to online courses through Udemy. There were so many different subject areas I’d always been interested in that I now had the time to pursue.
It was also when I committed to getting onto the path of fitness again.
There was a tech park within short walking distance of my house that I hadn’t been able to traverse since I had gotten Lyme. I hadn’t ventured back to it for three years. My walking had improved, but I still needed to wear compression socks to get around with some energy. And the couple times I tried to run at the gym, I was exhausted after only a couple of laps. The path I used to walk in the tech park was over four miles. I just didn’t think I had the stamina for it after a day at work.
Only now, with the world shut down and social distancing, I wasn’t going into work. The only walking I was doing was around my house, and when it got nice enough, around my back patio as I started to enjoy bringing my laptop there and working outside all day. My daily steps were greatly reduced, and combined with the need to want to avoid being confined in the house for as much as possible, I decided now would be a good time to venture back to the tech park.
I didn’t tackle the full four miles at first. For the first month, I would only walk to the park, and walk a very small portion of it. I would only do this three times a week, every other weekday, and was still wearing compression socks, but it was progress! On the days I wasn’t making this walk, I was on the elliptical for fifteen to twenty minutes, building up my leg strength in another way that allowed me to sit.
After getting used to this distance, I began extending the route a little bit more. I think I was only going a mile and a half at this point, I was still staying under two miles. But by this point I had stopped wearing compression socks because of the little I needed to walk around during the day in my house, and I was finding I wasn’t drained after these walks.
Psyching myself up, I decided to go for it. It would be a big jump, but the walk the tech park was laid out, if I was going to walk beyond two miles, I’d had to turn around and walk pretty much the entire distance back away, so I might as well just commit to the full four miles. By this point, the calendar had turned to May, the shut down had already been extended three times, and didn’t look to have an end in sight.
I went for it.
I loved being able to walk the whole distance of the tech park again. And again. And again. I increased the number of times I walked it per week, from three times after work per week to the first thing I did every morning while it was warm enough out. From mid-May through the end of September, if the weather allowed it, I started my day off with the morning four mile walk of the tech park. Like a lot of things during the shut down, it became an every day part of my routine, and even five years later, its still something I’m doing.
I had regained my stamina, at least for walking distances. And I could see my thigh, which had atrophied after the surgery, had regained the meat around the bone. I was still a long way from running, but I’d formed the foundation to one day get back into that activity.