Well, what a glorious week …Spring like. Sun shining, birds singing their Spring songs and the very first Spring flowers popping their heads above frosted soil. These are what my Grandad called ‘borrowed days’ for as sure as eggs we will pay them back, with interest, before the real Spring arrives. My years in farming taught me how true this is.
Anyway, a lovely week to complete Week 5 without too much trouble. I’d been a bit dubious about running twenty minutes for the first time in a long while but it was fine. I enjoyed it. I think the fact that I walk 3 to 5 miles with the dogs, every day of the year, in all weathers, may have kept some base level of fitness intact. A casual observer might remark that my ‘’running” isn't any faster than our brisk walking anyway, the only difference being that I’m not constantly stopping to look at birds, trees, clouds etc. I’m keeping going with the exercises to maintain the strength in my knees and other joints. I have to really as the steroids I take every day, to keep me the right side of the daisies, and the annoyingly large quantities of other drugs I have to take to replace the hormones I no longer produce, leave me at risk from reducing bone density/strength. I have a recurring nightmare that I will end my days as a skin sack supported by piles of degraded calcium…like an old teacher's school bag full of chalk. My asthma is worsening too, fairly well controlled at the minute but always liable to flare when somebody burns something they shouldn’t on their log burner/bonfire, somebody is spreading slurry or chicken muck on farmland or somebody on the till at the shop is wearing perfume that could easily double as industrial paint stripper. It amuses me that the Health Authorities always highlight the poor air quality in cities…rightly so…but everyone assumes that country air is as pure as Angels’ wings ; as the Gershwin song says, ‘It ain’t necessarily so’.
Anyway, time to head back out with the dogs: the sunshine beckons.