5B450 – The Miles

the miles

Obsessions, Knees and Spinning – Why I Probably Won’t Hit 500 Miles

Of the 5 goals I truly thought this was the one I would achieve. It’s the only one that kept pace with the time as I tracked my progress. I did make a big alteration how I counted miles. That’s where the obsession comes into play.

Obsession

When I set this goal, I was only counting miles walked that were intentional walks, not just daily movement. I made exceptions for days when I did high movement activities like mowing the yard. As I got into this a month or so, my husband noticed I was not getting a lot of variety in my activity, ie…I was ONLY choosing walking. I was basically getting obsessed with the miles.

So I relaxed my counting criteria and started evaluating each activity. For example, we play pickleball pretty regularly on the weekends. It’s very high energy and I get a lot of ‘active minutes’ on my Fitbit from it, meaning I get my heart rate up. Depending on how long or how intensely we played, I would count a mile or two from pickleball. I did this for a variety of activities like biking and kayaking and even strength training.

Lesson learned: I should have focused on a goal that encouraged overall increased activity, not one specific type of activity.

Knees

So if I made all those adjustments, why am I not going to make this goal? I’m a pretty active person. Well, I  was until about 3 weeks ago. I was squarely on track and might have even finished early. Then I tweaked my left knee somehow. I still have no idea what I did. It just hurts most days. I tried ‘walking through the pain’ but I just ended up limping slowly home. With this pain pickleball is out as well almost all of my other activities.

Spinning

Snorkeling in the Gulf

What about the spinning from above? I’m not talking about the gym version, I’m talking about the room around me version. I’m dealing with some dizziness/vertigo issues that started about a month before my knee pain. It has slowly impeded more and more of my activities, like driving and biking. I tried biking one day and was so nauseous from the movement for the first couple of miles that we rode back and gave up. 

So between the spinning and the knee pain, I keep close to home these days. I am still doing some strength training, part of that is focused on my knees, but I’m not getting the heart-rate kind of healthy activity I was getting a lot of for most of the challenge. I’m a little disappointed but one thing I know as I creep towards the larger birthdays, if you don’t stop and take care of the physical signs your body gives you…you more than pay for it later!

One thought on “5B450 – The Miles

Your Thoughts?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.