10km walk = 2 day sore to walk

Sunday afternoon, Dustin and I set out for a 10km walk along the Bow River in Calgary for 2 reasons:

#1 as a finish to an activity challenge that I participated in this summer and in order to receive my winnings for being the activity challenge winner!!!! (yay for me and yay for $$$$$)

and #2 because we need to get our buts in shape which is the reason that Dustin came along.  I think he may be a little miffed that he doesn't get in on the contest winnings which in all honestly he maybe should get a portion as he did accompany me on a hike trip and a bike trip so we'll see.  Maybe I'll give him a few dollars to buy himself something nice.  ha ha  Or, maybe having a slimmer girlfriend is enough of a payback.  ha ha

It was a pretty chilly day but we dressed up and headed off.  It was a beautiful walk along the river with lots of good people watching.  As an added bonus, it gave us a chance to have a chat along the way.  For us, that's not much of a problem, we are talkers so spend a fair amount of time just 'catching up' on eachothers lives (I know most of you are laughin and thinkin this is bound to change down the road especially once kids are involved).  However I can see this being an awesome activity for every couple.  I believe that all too often our regular day pace of life makes us tend to push aside spending time and just talking with the one we love.  Going for a walk together is a perfect chance to do that.  You can get active, enjoy being outside and you have nothing better to do but to catch up on eachothers lives and just visit - like friends, rather than like roommates and parents.  I think it's times like that when we force ourselves to slow down and enjoy life - that we can keep our souls happy, and inturn create better relationships in our lives.

Now being that neither of us have been doing much physical activity recently (as in we are lazy bums), we were sure to stretch at the beginning, stretch and the middle and stretch at the end of our walk.  We had a turn back point (bridge) that could have cut our walk shorter, but once we reached it we were still feelin spry and figured we could continue on the whole way.  About 4 km left, our bodies started 'speaking' to us.  At about 2 km left, our bodies started 'screaming' at us.  We decided to try a little jog to get other muscles moving and that did help for a bit - until our out of shape lungs started 'speaking' to us to!!  For the last 1km we were definetly feeling it in our legs.  We spent most of that last km talking about how glad we were that we did this.  How great it'll feel to be done, how we're going to try to increase our activity levels from now on.  This positive thinking helped us make it back to the car!  The warm car!  Even though I had my heart rate up, I still had frozen fingers and a body chill that was tough to shake!

We did it!  And we're proud of it!  We realized that we definetly need to get into better shape and increase our activity levels.  Hopefully we can stick to that plan and come spring (more enjoyable walking weather) we can do our 10km walk again and see how far we've come!