Walking. How we manage to move and keep balanced on only two feet is unexplicable to me. I have been making various types of 3-D ‘art’ in my life and I know how hard it is to get something that only has 2 ‘feet’ or ‘legs’ to stand up. It has to have perfect balance. And I mean, perfect balance.
I do not have perfect balance, but I do manage not to fall over 99.8 percent of the time. (the other .2 percent of the time is none of your business.)
So Mr. Downeastdoingstuff, recovering from open heart surgery, needs to walk. Walking is good for his heart. It’s good for lots of stuff, but there are only so many times he can walk from one end of the house and back again to get a good workout.
So off to the Maine Mall we go. To walk. Before hours. They actually open at 6:00 am for walkers!
He still is having a bit of trouble with fluid in his innards and sometimes he experiences what appears to be hyperventilation because of that. (He’s on some new meds for that...hopefully he won’t have to experience possible deflation again by having a hole punched into him with the biggest needle ever made.) Walking from the car in the subfreezing temps to the mall caused a little episode of this, but he quickly recovered.
“Are you OK?” (A question I have asked him about every 5 minutes since the surgery. Heck, I asked that question every 5 minutes even before the surgery.)
“Yeah, I’m fine” said Mr. DEDS as he was sitting on the curb trying to breathe. “Let’s go.”
So in we go. None of the stores are open yet so I don’t even recognize the place. Who knew the Mall had halls!
I read somewhere that if you walk around the perimeter of the mall, into every nook and cranny, it’s about a mile.
So here we go, walking at a pretty good pace, into every nook and cranny. ) (OK, so maybe we missed a cranny or two...)
All the way around....non-stop. Us and a bunch of other athletes doing the same thing.
When we got back to our starting point we sat down on a couch to rest. I had picked up a local community newspaper along the way and started reading a story. I barely got through one paragraph when he said,
“OK. Let’s go.”
“OK”, I replied, ready to put on my mittens and bundle up my scarf.
“No. Let’s do it again.”
“What?”, I gasped.
“Let’s do it again.”
So off we went and did it again. Two miles (ish).
Not bad for our first marathon, doncha think?