New Exercise Regime

I’ve decided I’m not getting enough exercise. This wasn’t a problem last summer, when was easy to finish work, eat, get the children off to bed and then take the dog for a long walk and still have daylight to spare. It got slightly harder in autumn, with one particularly memorable walk ending up with me stuck in the dark in the middle of some pitch black woods on account of having to go off-piste to avoid some cows that took exception to the dog.

In winter, walks in daylight seemed impossible, what with it getting dark mid-afternoon. But that’s ridiculous, I realised. The vast majority of the time I work from home, so it should be no problem to get out in daylight. On the other hand, the only real downside of working from home is that even though you tend to start earlier and finish later than the office-folk, they still tend to assume you’re sitting there all that time. Even putting the computer aside for lunch can mean a stream of irate messages when you return.

I think you probably make these expectations yourself though. I rarely do actually put the computer aside for lunch, preferring to drop crumbs in the keyboard instead, so I suppose it’s reasonable to be surprised when someone who’s pretty much always there is not there. However, with that in mind I’m going to make a new expectation which is that I’ll be taking a long walk, along with my trusty hound dog, in the middle of the day from now on. (Albeit with telephone, email and instant messaging in my pocket).

Of course, it’s easy to say you’re going to do something every day – harder to actually keep doing it. One really busy day leads into a really busy week and before you know it you’ve forgotten about the whole thing. So I decided to keep track of the walks on here, like this: today and yesterday. Will that help, or is it just an excuse to play with technology? Only time will tell.