The Forty Minute Mile

I’m not sure, but I think I have invented the forty-minute mile!  I consider it a great accomplishment too!  Or I will once I can make it.

I am walking every day in an attempt to become healthier.

I started walking less than ten minutes a day because my back ached so badly and my feet hurt even on such short jaunts.

After a couple of days I was up to fifteen minutes a day, but most days I only counted what it took to do my shopping, or volunteer work.  I didn’t really just go walking very much.

After eighteen days I accidentally walked too far from home to make it back in fifteen minutes and I discovered I had walked twenty minutes!  My back was better.  My feet were doing okay and I have continued to do that. 

It has only been five days, but I was almost immediately tired of it and struggled to make myself keep it up.  So…..I began counting my steps!  I use a  digital calculator – my fingers!  I count the steps to a hundred and stick down one finger on my left hand for each one.  When I get to five hundred, I stick down one finger on my right hand and start over on the left!  It keeps me distracted enough to keep going.

I have learned that I walk five hundred steps in five minutes and that each of my steps is eighteen inches long, so I walk a little over a half mile a day in twenty minutes.  I will not break any speed records with that, unless it is for the slowest mile and since I don’t yet walk even one mile, that is unlikely.

Still I am out there doing it and somehow that feels really good.