Walking, walking and walking

This post will be a bit on the photo-heavy (and long) side, but who can resist when you’re in a photogenic place, walking and exploring?
I’m doing my best to keep moving, keep doing my PT exercises, and do some more strength training too. I have no equipment other than a resistance band, but there’s a lot I can do with that. MY PT program now consists in banded ankle eversions, single leg heel raises, soleus heel raises, step-ups, step-downs, squats, lunges and banded crab walks. So I get plenty of strength training there and only add a few more things. For upper body I can’t do much but you get a long way with push-ups! Here’s how my week of fitness attempts has been:

Summary of the week:
Monday – PT + bodyweight strength
Tuesday – PT + morning walk, unknown distance, 1,5 hours.
Wednesday – PT + yoga + and I planned to do some strength but forgot about it!
Thursday – PT + walk in Castelli + forest walk 2,5 km + push-ups
Friday – PT + walk, 6-7 km + strength
Saturday – PT + push-ups + walking too much!
Sunday – most PT + push-ups + walking, 7-ish km in total

Monday

After a first week of warm sunny weather, this was a quite slow day because of clouds and some drizzle. In the afternoon the sun came back with some warmer temperatures, so I decided to take advantage of that and do something more than just my physio exercises. Honestly after only one week away from the gym, I started looking for heavy objects to do some deadlifts and whatnot. I enjoyed some push-ups, Bulgarian split squats and sumo squats. Happy days!

Physiotherapy exercises happen most days, and I’m finally making progress with lunges – perhaps my toes have given up and realised they’d better get moving, because I’m not going to stop trying!

Never mind my not-so-smiley face here, I’m focused!

Tuesday

Tuesday morning I went for a dog walk with the neighbour, one of these off-road, over the hills and far away kind of walks that I described in my previous post. These walks are fabulous but this morning it was HARD. When we walked home after the pizza night it was raining lightly, and on Tuesday morning it was dry but the lovely little road that goes down to the olive trees had turned into a sticky muddy mess.

Never in my life have I experienced such sticky mud! It quickly built up under and around my shoes (my beautiful purple Altra, even) and it felt like walking with bricks underneath the shoes. I thought I’d have to give up and turn back but tried to clean off my shoes the best I could using hands and droplets from olive trees, and when the neighbour came by with her dogs I was good to go. I looked like ***** but at least we could do the walk! We walked primarily on the grass so the walk did happen. But I had to stop now and then to take the worst mud and debris off my shoes. When I came back I had to put both my shoes and the clothes I had been wearing in the sink.

That was an experience and let’s say that if I ever walk there again after rain, I’ll use wellies!

Wednesday

On Wednesday, the weather was much improved. Our neighbour is a yoga instructor and had invited us for a yoga session in their garden, and it was the perfect morning for it – the sun was back! We’ve done some basic yoga with her before, 5 years ago. This time it was spine-focused, something I may need to be careful about because of low bone density, but she doesn’t do any advanced twisting or bending, and I only needed to adapt a little, by not doing certain moves in full range.

I enjoyed it but it was hard! Some moves required very flexible and strong toes – like getting into the downward dog position – and obviously I couldn’t do them full on, but she helped me do those in other ways. Even another lady with no foot injury had troubles with the toe flexibility so at least I wasn’t alone. Some of the moves at the end required some good leg and hip strength as well as hip mobility. I’m glad I’ve been working on that.

Thursday – a lovely day of walking and sightseeing

I got up wondering, did I do yoga or was that a heavy lifting session in the gym? Seriously, my hip flexors were screaming! I didn’t mind though, it shows I’ve been doing some hard work.

Before kicking off the day’s activities, we did some push-ups. 🙂

For this day we had planned a road trip and decided to go the route towards Gran Sasso, passing Farindola and Castelli, the latter famous for its ceramics production and they make some truly stunning work up there. Parts of the village have been destroyed by the earthquakes in 2016 but much of it is still ok and we had lunch and enjoyed a nice walk and visit in one of the shops.

We went to explore some walking trails in a nature reserve nearby too – didn’t find a map to begin with but we walked along one of the trails and back for about 2,5 km. It was a nice trail with some challenges for my foot with some steep hills and steps, but nothing that I felt was too much. It was a pleasant walk and we’ll likely go back again and explore the area a bit more.

Friday

Fridays are market days here so I had planned to walk into town to have a look. It’s a walk of 2,5 km to get to town and then I did some strolling in the town centre before going back, so in total I probably did more than 6-7 km. And my feet felt quite good!

Back at the terrace, I enjoyed three sets of push-ups and today I felt much stronger with them than previous days. I also enjoyed Bulgarian split squats and sumo squats.

Saturday

A greyish day with forecasted rain, but with a pleasant temperature, so I stayed home and went out for a shorter walk in the morning while my husband went back to the fitness trail around the lake for some running. I enjoyed this little route again, with no mud this time!

Later, since the weather was supposed to be dull and rainy, we decided to go to Pescara for some shopping, which of course means walking. A LOT. My feet didn’t particularly like this, but then I’m not a fan of Pescara either so… we agree, lol! It turned out this was the day of the Pescara marathon so what a pity we weren’t there to see the runners pass the finish line!

In the evening we had planned to walk to town and hang out at our favourite bar, have dinner there and taste some good grappas. This of course meant more walking! I reached 20 000 steps, roughly 15k this day and was worried I had walked too much but at least felt ok walking back.

Sunday

On Sunday morning my feet felt good but my calves… not so much. After a good stretching session, the calves were ready to move, but I decided to minimise walking just in case. Did it happen? Not really.
I started off the day with a short, slow, careful walk along the olive tree road, and then we decided to do a road trip to a village we’ve been recommended, Pescocostanzo. Many mountain villages around here are a bit deserted because many people have left for work or for fear of earthquakes and more (some villages have been hit hard in recent years with the earthquake in L’Aquila in 2009 and then another one in 2016). But Pescocostanzo seems to be a skiing resort and it was much larger and more active than I expected. We had a great time there walking (of course!) and having coffee.

And – we realised that a forest area we have also been recommended, was much closer than we thought so we went there to check it out. It’s a nice hiking area and especially in the autumn. I have barely seen real autumn colours since we moved to Ireland because in our area we don’t get them much (I’m still trying to figure out why). So this place fed my soul!

After arriving home after a long slow drive my shoulders were craving some movement so… why not some push-ups? And why not some squats and lunges while we’re at it? 😀 A good end of a good day.

If you made it to the end of this post, you can tell that this was a good week! I hope you had a good, active week too. Tell me about your highlights in the comments!

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Thanks Kim and Deborah for hosting the Weekly rundown link-up!