I’ve been going for a fast walk every morning lately. I started after the extreme heat began and I don’t mind. It feels good to do, hot or cool. I come home all sweaty and exhausted but those things wear off and what’s left is a really great feeling of having done something big. Something big for both my legs and my heart. My heart in terms of cardio but also joy, because of all the beauty everywhere. There’s something to fall in love with at every turn.
I almost always include a big hill. I just have to decide which big hill today. One of them, the one I tackle most days, is really big and long. It just goes on and on. You can see the top, or think you can, and then you get there and it’s still going on, and it begins to slope again. Oh. Oh man. Right around there someone has put out dog treats and a bowl of water, and you are tempted . . . And then once you’ve gotten to the actual top of it and you turn the corner, in no time at all there’s a slight rise there for a while, too. Slight, but still. So it’s a butt kicker of a hill. It’s a hill that makes you feel like you’ve really done something great. And I like that feeling. I honestly love these fast walks.
I have a minor shoulder problem that I’m trying to fix, which means I’m playing less pickleball lately. So the fast walk makes up for not running around chasing the ball at pickleball and since I want to do the fast walk before it’s unbearably hot, I’m going out at approximately the time I would normally play pickleball. Once my shoulder is all better, who knows what I’ll choose to do? One day I chose the fast walk regardless of the fact that I really felt like chatting with people, i.e. at pickleball. And then, as it turned out, I ran into three friends on my walk and stopped and had meaningful conversations with each of them. So, you just never know what will happen.
I listen to classical music on these fast walks, the previously described Vivaldi playlist which includes the “Gloria!” among others. Then, too, Mozart. Bach. Handel. Those fast, upbeat pieces, that get-up-and-go music that I love, especially in the morning, and which was written by those geniuses.
I like to have my fast walk start right outside my door, go down my street and across the busy street and down to the trail, so I get a bit of everything, i.e. neighbors, houses and yards, a park, loads of trees, dogs with their walkers, the trail and of course the aforementioned big hill. As far as choice of hill, there’s
Great big long hill (described above)
Shorter but very steep hill
Hill with switchbacks, created to accommodate bikes (easiest but still)
Another consideration in my choice of route, and therefore hill, is sun. If I get out a little bit late and the sun is higher, well, dodging the sun is harder to do, and you do want to dodge the sun on these hot days. I’ve learned, by trial and error, where to go, when. There’s quite a bit of strategy involved, in other words. Legs, heart, and brain, all getting a workout. Plus the gorgeous classical music and the surrounding visual feast, i.e. the treats.
So this is a great way to start the day, after, of course, Morning Pages. Since it’s a fast walk and not jogging, it’s easier on the joints and I go about as fast as I could if I was jogging, anyway, without all the bouncing. Truly wonderful.
By the way, my very first MerryThoughts letter, “Out for a Walk,” was published on November 18, 2020. You can read it here. It concerned not a fast walk, but a walk of another kind, and with my stalwart companion, Miles.
“If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should explode and perish.” - Charles Dickens
“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.” - Henry David Thoreau
“I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.” - Noel Coward
“Walking is the threshold to God's greatest church: solitude.” - Maureen Muldoon
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Thanks for listening,
Kay
P.S. MerryThoughts is the name of my first book, out of print at the moment. The word is a British one, referring both to a wishbone and to the ritual of breaking the wishbone with the intention of either having a wish granted or being the one who marries first, thus the "merry thoughts."