Getting a grip
If you only know me through this blog you might not realise how difficult I find it to stick at anything. I so often give up or lose my motivation and then before I know it I'm back to square one. This dementia affected life however is something I can't give up on so I've had to come up with strategies to cover as many eventualities as I can think of. There are of course the strategies to help Ash cope with life and which in turn make my life just that little bit easier but there are also the strategies which keep me on the straight and narrow and those are the ones which make me focus. This morning I realised that I've stopped exercising. I used to go out at 7am every morning and walk for an hour but a couple of weeks ago, 3 mornings in a row, I got as far as the road and almost fell over on the ice so I decided to give up on that until the 7ams were lighter and the frost was gone. Instead I was going to go on my treadmill every afternoon except that I didn't. I always meant to but the mornings drifted by and the afternoons seemed to be taken up with important stuff such as lunch, video calls with friends, sitting with Ash in front of the tv etc and there just wasn't time to do the 2 hour hikes I had planned. On top of that we have lockdown and my walks with friends have had to stop so there was even less activity which also meant I wasn't sleeping as well. Then a friend said that she was walking up and down stairs ten times each day ready for hills when we start walking again and I thought 'brilliant idea, how hard can that be?' but it turns out that it's really, really hard work so I only did it once and gave up. Do you see what I mean now about my natural state? It wasn't that I wasn't using the treadmill or doing the occasional walk from the village but I really wasn't doing as much as I needed to and something had to change. This morning for some reason it all came to a head and I knew I had to do something, I needed a strategy that would get me moving again and one where I wouldn't fall at the first hurdle so this is my plan. Instead of looking for very, very long treadmill hikes I've looked for 40 minute ones, I put my treadmill gear on and did the hike (in Corsica if you're interested) before breakfast and then this afternoon I set out and walked for another half an hour outside in the frost and the sunshine. So I'm not walking for as long as I was and I'm not walking as far as I was but what I've come up with is, I hope, more manageable, and more sustainable resulting in my fitness levels remaining steady until I can get out into the surrounding countryside for those hikes with the views. Strategies and plans are for me the only way forward and it's been useful to recognise that fact.
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