If you have been fitness walking for a while - and if you haven’t scroll down this page for tips on starting - you will have read Nina Borough’s excellent book Walking for Fitness and be an Advanced walker. You will know you are an Advanced Walker when you can walk continuously for 30 minutes and keep up a conversion at the same time. So now is the time to buy a pedometer. This little instrument tells you exactly how many steps you have taken, how far you have walked, how many calories consumed and, if you really want to know, analyses your body fat. And all for about ten dollars.
Another thing you may want to consider is early morning exercises. I do them for half an hour each morning and top up with ten minutes at night. I find exercise wakes me up, although it’s not a good idea to get so enthusiastic that you want to lie down afterwards. Half an hour is not necessary and certainly not at first. To start just touch your toes (or as near as you can get) five times. Then do side stretches, bending to touch the side of your leg, five times each side. Nothing to it. After a week or so of this do each ten times. That’s probably all you need for a while. In the meantime carry on walking and look around, particularly in early winter for the swans are arriving.
Swans? Let me explain. A few days ago I went to the Welney Wildfowl and Wetland Trust Nature Reserve in Eastern England. Each year wild swans nest in the arctic and migrate south for the winter. Among the places they visit are the Ouse Washes, an area of the River Ouse in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire which is allowed to flood between earth banks, half a mile apart and many miles long. The result is an internationally important wildfowl wintering ground. This autumn we have 2000 swans on the Ouse Washes and numbers are building. Some are ringed, so we know they return year after year. Family parties arrive, up to seven young birds having been guided by their parents over sea and tundra to safety on the Ouse Washes. If you can get there do go, it is half an hour’s drive from Cambridge. You can watch from a hide or walk to other hides, your spirits will be uplifted and there is a coffee shop as well.