January

January's total is in... at 99.9 miles! How hilariously tantalising is that?!

Still, I only need 83.3 miles a month to keep on target, so it's nicely ahead of that, even if it does make me want to go out and walk 0.1 of a mile up the road before midnight tonight, just to tip it over the edge.

Can't believe a whole month is over already. It's been a big week for walking, with a 12 mile walk from Henley to Pangbourne last weekend, and then managing to notch up about 10 miles in the course of my work over the last two days. I've had back to back home visits booked over the last two days, and a 10-15 minute walk to each one from the bus stop / station / last one doesn't seem like much, but when you factor in 10 of them, it suddenly adds up.

I'm definitely glad I started this. I was looking at endurance / charity walks the other day and thinking about signing up, but decided against it in the end. I want to challenge myself, but I don't want to push my body to its limit. At the moment I'm really enjoying being outdoors and walking, even when it's crazily windy (like today) or icy and muddy (like on Saturday), and I don't want this challenge to become a chore, or one more thing to have to stress about. I've been reading a lot about focussing on positives at the moment, and being out in the fresh air, looking and listening to what's going on around, even in the middle of a big city, is a great way of doing that.

Some pictures of the Henley to Pangbourne walk:

It was icy...

and muddy.

There were piggies...

 an alpaca farm...

and a scarecrow with a dog made out of wellington boots.

 And most importantly, it was all rounded off with tea and a lovely piece of cake (raspberry and white chocolate, for anyone who's interested!)

Penguins and Helicopters

First of all, to oblige Charlie H (I wonder who that could be?), have a picture of a penguin. He's walking, so fits the theme of the blog perfectly...

I'm currently trying to make an ice penguin. It's a mould which my best friend (who lives in Helsinki) sent me for Christmas. You fill it with water, leave it outside in freezing weather, and voila, ice penguin. It's not going so well at the moment though, possibly because as cold as it feels here, I'm told it was -30ºC in Helsinki at the weekend, so I think it's made for that kind of weather. He's lying outside with a thick coat of snow on him though, so fingers crossed.

Back to the walking. I've come to the conclusion that my pedometer is picking up a lot of extra walking from station entrances down to platforms and that kind of thing. I already set the step length a little too short to try to compensate, but I think I need to do a little more than that, because there's no way I've been walking quite as far as it says I have, and I don't have a good enough memory to keep taking it in and out of my pocket according to whether I want my steps tracked or not. I already round down the total it's giving me, but I'm also going to deduct 2.5km from my total every week, just to make sure it's completely fair and enough of a challenge.

So... totals so far:

Week 1 -  17.5 miles
Week 2 - 24.2 miles
Week 3 - 17.8 miles

Which puts me a whole 2 miles over target. This last week has mostly been a lot of walking for work - more than planned, just because I happened to have home visits in and around Vauxhall on Weds and Thurs, and the only way to get anywhere near where I needed to go was to walk, cos all the roads within almost a mile's radius were sealed off for the helicopter crash.

Fear not. I'm not just going to write about walking here. Given that I'm aiming to keep this up for a year, it could get (or maybe already is) more than a little dull. So I'll intersperse it with a few penguins and other bits and pieces here and there.

The Capital Ring (3) - Grove Park to Crystal Palace

Nearly two weeks in and the pedometer has notched up 42 miles (translated from its German 67.5 km). This puts me just ahead of the 2.8 miles per day needed to reach my target, thanks to today's 7.5 mile walk along part of the Capital Ring.

There are numerous walking routes in and around London, and as I said in my last post, I'm hoping this challenge will motivate me to make better use of them. The Capital Ring is 78 miles in its entirety, and if the London Outer Orbital Path (LOOP) is the walker's equivalent of the M25, then the Capital Ring is the North and South Circular, running in a loop around London through suburbs located roughly in zones 3 or 4.

I'm hoping to have walked the whole thing by the end of the year, but we started today with section 3, the closest bit to us. It runs from Grove Park to Crystal Palace, through the Great North Wood in Downham (north of what, I wonder?) and the lovely Beckenham Place Park.  One unexpected highlight is that it also took me very close to two of the places important to my childhood - my Great Aunt's old maisonette in Beckenham where we used to go and stay, and my parents' old house in Penge, where we lived until shortly after my 3rd birthday.

We unexpectedly came across the Kent Country Cricket Ground (this one's for my cricket-mad parents):

Other highlights included meeting a giant squirrel in Beckenham Place Park:

Seeing (and most definitely hearing) a few of London's infamous wild parakeets (although a dog kept chasing them away while I was trying to take photos):

And the Crystal Palace Park dinosaurs:

All rounded off nicely with a late roast lunch in Crystal Palace.

While I may have looked a little like a powder puff or the Michelin man, my new walking socks and gilet both have a definite seal of approval for keeping me nice and snug in the (possibly slightly below) freezing temperatures. Despite the cold though, I really enjoyed myself and I think we're both looking forward to the next section.

The Reasons and Rules

Once I'd worked out in my head that I probably walked an average of 500 miles a year already, I started thinking about challenging myself to double it. I thought that more walking would help me to keep fit and would also be good for my mental health. Last year was a difficult year at work for many reasons, and I found that walking home occasionally helped to get rid of some of the stress that had built up during the day. I deliberated it for a little while, because I was wary of setting myself an unachievable goal and making myself feel worse for not being able to reach it, thereby taking all of the pleasure out of something I enjoy doing, but I don't think that's going to be a problem unless my circumstances change somehow during the year. I already go walking once a month with friends, but I'm hoping that another benefit of this challenge will be that it drives me to explore some of the many walking routes in London that I've wanted to try out for some time and somehow never found time for.

So, those are my reasons. Now for the rules:
1. Any kind of walking counts, whether I go out for the sake of walking, or whether I walk to somewhere (e.g. work or the shops)
2. Wandering does not count (e.g walking round the shops or walking to the kitchen to get a cup of tea at work!)
3. It's meant to be fun. I shouldn't stress about the challenge or the blog. It doesn't matter if the only people who read it are my mum, my girlfriend and possibly my girlfriend's mum, depending on how well the translate function works.

I've got my fancy new pedometer so off I go...