Tag Archives: walking

National Walking Day!

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Every day on snapchat, I encourage people to walk. If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ll know walking is one of my true passions in life and that David and I have been walking for at least 11 years now. 

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Well, Wednesday is your chance to get started on a walking program. It’s National Walking Day! 

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The American Heart Association has the following suggestions for how you can participate in National Walking Day. 

  • Take a walk on April 6!  (We encourage a 30-minute walk.) 
  • “Donate” your minutes walked that day at #AHALaceUp. Whether it’s 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour, post your minutes on social media using the hashtag #AHALaceUp and help us reach a total “donation” of 100,000 minutes walked across America! Follow our updates all day.
  • Want to encourage friends and family to join you? Planning a walk at work or school? It’s easy! Get the free National Walking Day toolkit with tips and promotional materials here!
  • And follow @american_heart on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for news and tips on fun ways to move.

I hope you’ll give it a whirl. It’s so easy and you’ll feel great afterwards. See you there! And don’t forget #AHALaceUP. 🙂

Mrs. Southwest International 2016

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If you’ve been following along, you’ve seen that I’ve made a couple of appearances in the past month wearing a new banner. Yes, I’m Mrs. Southwest International 2016 and I’ll be competing at the Mrs. International Pageant in Jacksonville, FL next July. I’m excited!

I’ve loved the International system for a long time. I directed the Oklahoma pageant from 2006 until 2011 when we were told we’d be moving to Saudi Arabia. I reluctantly gave up my directorship. While I was directing, I was the only female director who’d never competed. At my last director’s meeting, the other directors suggested I should compete. I demured.

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But the idea remained in the back of my head. The competition age for Mrs. International is from 21-56. As I get closer to 56, I realize that I’m running out of eligibility to compete in this pageant. I discussed it with my husband, who agreed I should compete. I also have the strong encouragement of many friends, so I entered.

What I love about the Mrs. International system is the requirement to have a community service platform that you’ll promote throughout your year. I’ve been promoting walking for health for the past 10 years and that will be my pageant platform as well. I’ll be aligning myself with the Start! Walking Now program with the American Heart Association. I’ve been working with the AHA since 2008, mostly with the Go Red for Women program but, as happened the other day when I joined them at the Capitol for the tobacco rally, whatever they need my support for, they have. I love the message of the AHA. There are so many simple things we can do to ensure our heart remains healthy and knowledge is power! If you can share that message, and let people know what they can do, you help them.

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I’m really looking forward to this year as Mrs. Southwest International and the culmination of the year at the pageant next June. If you’re interested in competing for Mrs. International, many states have preliminary pageants you can participate in. You can find them at the Mrs. International website. If you decide to enter, let me know! 🙂

The Strawberry Tree

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Yesterday, I videotaped part of my walk so you could see the strawberry tree. Then I ate the strawberry I picked up.

Y’all, those things are awesome! Really, really sweet. The outsde is pretty bumpy and I didn’t care for it so much but the insdie? Delicious! David wouldn’t even try it. His loss. I didn’t die so it’s all good. 😀

Here’s the video. 🙂

 

Walking and Falling

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You know how I’m always going on and on about walking? Well, it turns out it’s good for you. ::hee hee hee:: I found this video when I was looking around the intenet. It’s pretty funny. 

 
It’s true that the benefits of walking just 30 minutes a day are numerous. I’ve been walking consistently for 10 years now. What started out as a way to get out of the house so we could talk about our nephew who was a bit of a handful has turned into something I would miss terribly if I had to go without.

I sleep better, feel better and look better. We are always surprised how, at 54, we are on no prescription medications when so many people we know, who are younger than us, are. It’s become a way of life for us. 

It can for you, too! It’s super easy, inexpensive, and fun. I just found a new walking path that I really love the other day. It has several hills but also STAIRS! The stairs go under the CalTrain tracks and when I get to them, I run up and down several times. I’m up to 14 now.

Yesterday when I walked, there were work guys at the other side of the tunnel. I asked one guy if it would be okay if I ran the stairs and he said it would be fine but he didn’t really seem like he meant it so I told him I’d just do them tomorrow. 

As I walked, I remembered the stairs down to the Guadalupe River Trail where I typically ride my bike. When I got there, I ran them. 

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And fell.

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These stairs are a little wider than the other set I usually run and I think I just adjusted wrong. But I’m okay. My face and phone (nor anything else) aren’t broken and I just have a couple of bruises.

Anyway, all’s well that end’s well. Get out and walk today. It’s such fun and you’ll feel better for it. I won’t even expect you to do stairs. Yet. 😉

E is for Exercise

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I do a lot of exercise. Believe it or not, I even like it! I’ve been a walker for a lot of years. For most of my walking miles, David has been with me and I think of it as our alone time where it’s just us and no distractions. But even when David hasn’t been home, I still walk. 

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I was waiting to lose down to a certain weight to start running again. I used to run a lot in the early 1990s but felt like I was just too heavy to run now even though my walks were getting faster and faster and I had friends on the runkeeper app encouraging me to just run.

When we moved here, I left the scale behind. Because I had no idea if I was at the magical number that would allow me to begin running, I just started running. And it was hard. No, it was HARD. 😀 I ran quite a lot of distance back in the day and I just don’t remember it being so hard back then. Of course I was 25 years younger so that could’ve had something to do with it. But I persevered telling myself, “pretty soon, this will be your warm up”.

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Now, I’m not there yet but I have been able to to gradually increase my mileage and I’m now up to two miles a day. Best of all, I’m getting air all the way down to the bottom of my lungs the whole run. Which is great since I like to breathe.

And cycling. How I love that. I’ve been doing that twice a week since I got my bike. I go a little further each time and it’s just fun. 

Every day living here in Downtown San Jose, involves a lot of exercise. Unless I have the dog or  something really heavy, I always take the stairs. Our apartment is on the third floor and the garage is even one floor further down. I walk every where downtown. Library, grocery store, post office, dinner. It’s great. I’ve been more active here than I have been in a lot of years.

And I like it. I really do. I love feeling strong when I’m walking down the street. I love feeling accomplished when I get done with a run or bike ride. I know this is good for my health but it’s also good for my mind. I am a rare person who doesn’t wear headphones while exercising. I have deep discussions with my inner self and I come to a lot of conclusions, make a lot of plans this way.

If you don’t exercise every day let me encourage you to give it a try. Even just a ten minute walk to start is better than nothing at all. Then work your way up little by little until you are enjoying more physical and mental well being. You’ll be glad you did! 😀

Buzzed Walking

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I’m sure if you listen to the radio or watch TV at all you’ve heard the commercials about Buzzed Driving. Well, now I’m going to tell you about buzzed walking.

I’ve been living UP since June 24, 2013. That’s when, after hearing about it from my twitter friend @ginidietrich, I got my own UP band.

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The UP band can record all kinds of things but I mainly use it to record my daily steps and my sleep. I’ve set a goal of 10,000 steps per day and eight hours of sleep. And I’m incredibly fascinated by the sleep data over everything else. I really love it when it shows a larger amount of time in deep sleep over light sleep. I really like it when I reach my goal. But I digress.

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The sleep goal is tough to achieve consistently and I feel like I have more control over the steps. Especially since my UP teammate and friend @sallyray5 introduced me to “house walking”. This is where you do your steps walking in your house. Some days it’s super easy to get in those 10,000 steps but on days when it’s icy or I just haven’t been as active, house walking it is. 

Buzzed walking is an extension of house walking. 🙂

You are able to set your UP band to buzz you (you feel the buzz on your wrist) when you’ve been sedentary for a certain portion of time which you can choose. I have mine set for 30 minutes.

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Now, when I’m inactive and am “buzzed”, I proceed to do buzzed walking. I go downstairs, turn on the radio, put four minutes on the kitchen timer and start walking laps around the downstairs. Easy peasy. After I’m done with the walk, I’ll drink a glass of water to add to my eight glasses of water a day goal and go back to what I’m doing.

I really like this easy way of meeting my walking and water goals. If only sleep were as easy although I think I’m close to the answer for that, too! I’ll let you know. 😉

Littering by any other name…

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My friend J and I have been walking pretty regularly for almost three years now. (Wow! Has it been that long?) Our normal path takes us south down Keeler Avenue, east on 18th Street, then north on Johnstone Ave until we get back to her house on 12th street.

We call ourselves The Old Bat Patrol. Along the way, we pick up garbage. We even have garbage sticks and t-shirts.

It’s pretty amazing to both of us just how much garbage accumulates along this path when we are pretty diligent in picking it up four days a week. The main things we pick up are pop cups, beer cans, cigarette packages and The Hometown Shopper. Lots and lots of copies of The Home Town Shopper.

The Home Town Shopper is a Bartlesville Examiner Enterprise production. It’s tossed in the yards of every house on our walking path on either Tuesday or Wednesday, I can’t be sure. We even get a copy on the lawn of The Big House, which is currently (and noticeably) unoccupied. I pick them up when I mow the grass.

We don’t have a subscription to the Examiner Enterprise but are still the recipient of this paper that goes straight from my lawn into my garbage can. I unrolled the one above so I could take a photo to add to this blog.

Dear Examiner- Enterprise,

No one is reading The Home Town Shopper which you so generously toss on our lawns each week.

They run over them with their lawnmowers.

Leaving little schnibbles for us to try and pick up.

They just leave them lay, until they are yellow and so many in number that J and I pick them up and throw them away for you.

Sometimes, they land in the street (or are put there!).

When they look like this

we can’t pick them up anymore. They’ve become one with the asphalt.

We love walking, including picking up the garbage. It’s good exercise and it makes us feel like we are doing something possitive for our neighborhood.

I do, however, feel sorry for the advertisers in the Examiner-Enterprise who believe that there are people actually seeing their advertisements in The Home Town Shopper. It’s clear that no one is reading these papers.

It might be time for the Examiner-Enterprise to get into the 21st century and find some better way to help their advertisers get their word out. Hey, twitter is free! 🙂