In the past seven days I have walked 56km. That’s about 84k steps and I’m so far on a seven day streak of at least 10k steps a day.

A bit over two months ago I was so unfit that I struggled even walking 2km. I remember having to take a break and was exhausted when I got there. Granted it was over 30°C and I was still mostly unused to it, but I remember that day. And I remember thinking I really needed to do something about it and started walking more. Even a few days later I could already tell there was an improvement and last month I walked 107km.

I set myself the marathon distance within a week as a loose goal two months ago in a state of madness, but knew it wasn’t achievable as I was doing too much and could’ve caused injury. Then both October and this month saw some days/weeks where I didn’t really get out which is why it’s taken this long. As a goal this doesn’t matter – it’s a thing I have achieved, but I am not doing this to hit milestones though it’s nice to do that every now and then. Rather I am walking more to be more fit to be able to have a life change and to be able to do more.

Not being fit is inhibiting to the point where simple tasks seem daunting and you don’t go somewhere with friends or to events because you’d know that your lack of fitness would cause other people to not being able to do what they want. In my head I would see distances stretch out in my head, like they do in some films or games, because a hundred metres to someone else would be several times that distance to me. It’s incredibly hard to explain this to someone fitter as even I am starting to gloss over the early days, similar to how people forget how awful a cold is and the sympathy for others goes down until they themselves experience another cold. I have a piece of paper with some memories of how hard some early walks were to fall back on, but ultimately that also won’t fully remind me.

A thought that occurred to me yesterday [at the end of my 9km walk] was that I was walking along a stretch of road which even a couple months ago would leave me feeling dread at the distance and also leave me slightly breathless at the end of it, yet here I was at the end of a walk at least twenty times the length and I was still energised and happy. Here’s why:

• I had just walked 9km
• It was unbelievably sunny [but I was never walking directly towards the sun so had full visibility] and blue skies with pretty clouds
• It was cold enough that the heat didn’t cause issues
• I had made significant progress in my Lord of the Rings audiobook [the fellowship made it from Rivendell to Lothlorien]
• The walk didn’t leave me feeling like I’d overdone it