40 degrees? Florida!

I do know that it is much, much colder north of us. I have lived through that kind of weather myself, at another time in my life. But can you imagine it was 40 degrees F in sunny (not so sunny) Florida this morning?? That's crazy considering that between 70 - 90 is more the normal temperature here!  Steve & I still went for a walk this morning all bundled up (see above) and this afternoon too. Fortunately, it had warmed a bit by then, to 48! 

We started brisk walking 2x a day, a week ago at Steve's suggestion. My watch tracks steps, distance & time so I added everything up to see what we have accomplished in a week.  24.52 miles (in 8 hours) over 7 days!! 

wow. That is much more than I expected. My muscles feel it and sometimes when we first start out I breathe harder than normal, but all in all, it feels good! We have definitely created a habit and now we have a commitment to walking together twice a day. Tomorrow morning I have an early pilates class, so we've already decided we'll skip the morning walk. But there is always tomorrow afternoon! 

It's funny that for a long while I felt I was not moving enough or being active enough. I did take some dance classes, balletone, but I still was not burning enough calories, gained some weight and the steps my watch counted were pretty dismal! I was unsatisfied, but could not find a way to get myself to consistently move more. 

Then when I was explaining to Steve how I was going to change my diet a bit, he said to me, "If you really want to burn some calories . . . " He said this because he used to walk twice a day at a good healthy pace to get in shape for whitewater paddling & it worked! He wanted to try walking to see if that was what his hip needed (it was) and he was not likely to do it alone. The subject came up, we talked about it and BOOM! We started the next day. 

I am so glad! Thanks for challenging me, Steve!