My concept of purposeful walking..? 19 12 06 (4) 25 2 23

When I was a young man of 20 I met this girl I shall call M-L whilst on holiday and I became infatuated with her and I guess she too was interested in me to the extent we started dating. Not a big deal you might suppose but for the fact that I met her in arctic Norway on her way home to Finland and I was the guy her mode of transport, a touring bus had just given a lift to, as the hitch-hiker I was…My true lift was in a car carrying hauling gear to pull the bus back onto the highway from a ditch at the side of the road, and it was these people as you might say the people in charge of the bus that offered me my subsequent ride in it.

It was one of the best lifts I ever got because it turned out to be open-ended which is to say the bus was returning to Helsinki and so had the length of the country to travel and I was given the opportunity to travel with it all the way if I had chosen to. So I began my journey and at the end of each day stayed wherever the bus stayed. In this way I stayed maybe 3 or 4 nights but then decided to leave the bus and make my own way south because I was running short of funds and needed to get a summer job to earn some money as soon as possible.

Six weeks later I returned home to England to resume my part-time chemistry course when a correspondence began with my writing I guess in a mixture of English and Finnish which anyone with a knowledge of Finnish will tell you is no mean task because even for gifted linguists it is not so easy, and learning languages is probably one of my worst attributes.

Well this background is the background to my habit and later hobby of walking which began as I tried to get my head sorted out in this quite intense first what became a more serious relationship.

Over the years that followed I moved on from this relationship but kept the pastime of walking which I found therapeutic in getting my head sorted out in other areas of my life too, like my budding career as an Industrial Chemist.

As I got older however my pace of walking got curtailed which I came to realise is a natural consequence of the aging process. To check it out next time you are out walking just see how your speed compares to someone at 20, boy or girl, and note that you can only keep up with them if you are in the same age group, and note how someone at 40 will be appreciably slower than someone of 20, etc., etc., etc.

Well this last couple of years in particular, after my walking ever slower as a natural development over the years, I have purposefully began to speed it up to the extent I now believe I am walking faster than I have walked for years but guess what? You’ve got it I am still far slower than people of 20 however much I try to keep up with them.

But nay bother my purpose is to try to keep up and little by little I am getting better at it to the extent I may now be able to keep up with most 35 year olds…hahaha   

My wife who happily is almost 5 years my junior is a case in point because for many years I had noticed she was faster than I on a flat surface but now recently she has had to rein me in and tell me not to walk so fast…Check it out and see whether you agree or disagree and maybe come back and leave me a comment!

My concept of purposeful walking..? 19 12 06
Imagine reading this after writing it a little over 5 years ago? Like me when i shall be 90 yrs of agealways assuming of course one's lives so long. But when last September i began my third year of walking 10 000 steps a day and last year began scaling 100 metres of ascent during my walks which continued to include a daily dip in the sea to the extent that the endorphins released as a result, have me sometimes running home, especially if the air temperature is sub zero Celsious 32 degF!