Walk in her shoes – the wrap-up

I’ve finished the Care Australia Walk in Her Shoes Challenge! Thank you everyone who sponsored me – I appreciate your contributions.

Now I’ll let you into a little secret. Officially I was trying to walk 20,000 steps each day, but my competitive mind had other plans in store for me and it wanted me to do 25,000.

Thanks competitive mind.

So how did I do? Here are the final numbers:

• Monday: 27,655
• Tuesday: 26,483
• Wednesday: 25,122
• Thursday: 26,183
• Friday: 25,795
• Saturday: 30,018
• Sunday: 21,958

The 5 am starts every day were hard, but it was a good way to get in some exercise that I wouldn’t have had time to do at any other time of the day. It also meant that I didn’t have to walk for as long in the evenings to reach my daily step goal. In the past I’ve been reluctant to go for a walk after dinner because I always seem to have stuff to do, and going for a walk takes up too much before-bed time. (That was my excuse not to exercise. I’m very good at making these excuses.)

Ahh, priorities.

Saturday was an interesting day. I’d planned – and was happy – to spend most of the day preparing my feast for the Tassivore Eat Local Challenge, so I knew I had to get as much walking done as possible in the morning. I set myself a target of a 2 hour walk to see how far I could get. As I’d just missed 10 km on Tuesday, I really wanted to at least do that and see how I felt.

I ended up walking 12 km in just over 2 hours, and it took me an hour and 48 minutes to get to 10 km.

I’m not sure of the exact step count, but it was over 16,000. I’m not sure I ever want to do that again.

The rest of Saturday’s steps came from being on my feet all day and night, and by the end of what was a late night, I was exhausted. When the alarm went off at 5 am on Sunday, my body said no, and went straight back to sleep.

I felt pretty ordinary on Sunday morning and I could feel the beginning of a cold coming on. I think I might have just pushed myself a bit too far, so my walks were fairly gentle recovery walks. There was no way I was going to let myself get through six days of this challenge and fail on the very last day, but I can tell you I was hanging out for that little 20,000 step buzz on my Fitbit with every step I took.

As soon as I hit 20,000 I collapsed onto the couch and did very little for the rest of the day.

The challenge for me now is to maintain some of the momentum (not quite this much) and not fall back into my old non-exercising ways. I’m not off to a good start this week, but I promised myself some new shoes to replace these 8 year-old shoes, which are starting to show (and feel) signs of their age, if I succeeded in the 20,000 steps challenge, so maybe that will inspire me to keep going.