Walking....

Remember back in 2016 when my run of injuries and medical complaints was bordering of farcical? No? Well no I suppose not, it is the funny posts that people seem to remember rather than the sad ones that make them well up. Anyhow, the culmination of these was a particularly nasty ankle sprain in Abu Dhabi that in truth has never quite healed, putting paid to what would almost certainly have been a promising career in competitive cycling. With this avenue of calorie-burning cruelly cut off, I resorted to only thing left that I could manage. 

Walking.

Yes, that noblest and most intense of exercise regimes, striding up and down London's alpine-esque landscape, flab falling by the wayside with every step. Well, more gentle strolling really, mostly on Wanstead Flats. Anyway, whilst it might not have raised my heart rate much above whatever it is normally, what it lacked in aerobic it made up for in sheer distance. I walked 1764.32 miles over the course of the year. I know this as my pedometer was constantly on, and I made the effort, daily, to bung it on a spreadsheet so that I could retrieve all sorts of interesting facts. For instance the most distance I covered in a day was 17.57 miles, and the least was 0.07 miles or 162 steps. Not sure what I was doing that day. Dying in bed is the only reasonable explanation that fits, but actually I would have said that 2017 was amongst my healthiest. I had a couple of bouts of diverticulitis, but you cannot keep a good man down as they say, and I did not visit a doctor once, nor set in foot in any kind of medical facility, Frankly after 2016 I would have performed an amputation on myself rather than go to a hospital. 

1764 miles is a long way. Setting off from London, it would have taken me further than Moscow. It is nearly twice as far as Rome, far further than Reykjavik, Helsinki, Athens, Istanbul or Marrakech. The approximate distance is from London to Rhodes, which probably takes about 4 hours to fly to. But it was in a failing cause as it is not quite five miles per day which was the goal I set myself. Maybe I was over-optimistic, maybe just stupid, but I did come pretty close. Those of you who, like me, have calculators on your desks will no doubt already have tapped this in and worked out that it is 4.83 miles per day. I don't think that's a bad effort at all, after all I am no spring chicken. And a lot of it will have been whilst weighed down with an enormous camera.....

Which is the point of this entire post. Well yes it would have been quicker to say that I went out on the patch today and took a pile of photographs but, well, you know how it is. I went here and I saw this. Not on this blog. Readers truly have to bear with me. So, as threatened yesterday I unpacked the camera for its first outing of 2018. At first it was dull as proverbial ditch-water, but I continued trotting round and eventually the low winter sun came out. Which enabled me to take these.