Walking Progress

I've slowed down a little on my walking recently. Interestingly enough, this has happened during the summer months when I have more an excuse to get out and enjoy the nice weather.

Part of this has been because I've been taking Tara to the beach and wading into water with a hyperactive labrador isn't really a good place to go with your phone. So I am walking, I'm just not tracking these walks.

Part of it is because Tara is a black labrador and she gets hot. The tarmac gets hot too, so we can't go out during the really hot weather because that would just be mean. So we stay in then.

And yes, part of it has been because I've been a little bit lazy. Don't judge.

But yesterday I went for a pretty good 'restart' walk with a group of four other girls from work. We've all been a little lax in our walking so took the opportunity to take a gentle stroll together to get lunch in the hopes we could pick up our walking group again.

Twelve miles later I staggered up the path to my in-laws' house, tired, sweaty and pretty proud of myself for surviving it after sticking to less than two miles at a time for the last few weeks.

I walked a little over a mile to the swimming baths where we started and our walk looked something like this:

We stopped for lunch and then headed back into town:

I love that it was exactly the same distance there and back again.

Speaking of 'there and back', it's helped me catch up a little on my progress across Middle-earth.

I knew I needed to pick up my pace a little as I was edging away from my target end date of the 31st of December, but now I'm back on track.

Having reached 320 miles this morning I'm onto Day 18 of the Hobbits' journey. I'm camping in a valley. There's been a lot of camping going on during this leg of the journey, but in the next 16 miles things are going to start picking up. I'm looking forward to having some more interesting things to chronicle in my Walking Journal.

I'll let you know how I get on.