Rumination: The Season has Stalled, Again.

The product of of our two days of
creative DIY, and while I'm not normally
one to trumpet my successes, on this
occasion I think I have to say 'Toot Toot!'.

Once again in this frustrating seventh season of walking that is 2018, I find myself unable to get out on the trail, my fourth consecutive weekend that I have failed to get onto the trail in any capacity, which starts to get me fearful that any more delays in this season might result in my will to walk to drain away, a thought that hadn't been entertained at any point in the last four seasons. It's been a frustrating few weeks since my last trail Up Country on 10th March, losing a weekend to grim conditions and illness, before taking another out to be sociable and entertained by other means, and as Spring has been resolute in its unwillingness to appear, allowing us only three nice weekdays since the turn of the seasons, and I find myself in a glum place once again. I ought to talk up the good things that have come from this last month so that I don't wallow too hard, and the first of these has to be the days of woodworking and labour which had Dr G and myself rebuilding the raised vegetable box in  My Parents' garden, a task that had seemed like it might be just a remedial patch-up job when first planned, but turned out to be much more serious once the extent of the rot had been discovered and instead requiring some £60 worth of fresh materials and two days of work. It could probably have been done quicker, but both of us were doing a lot of planning on the fly as we are both skilled in the fine art of bodging, and one of us is much less skilled in the handling of tools than the other, plus we had to deal with some deeply inclement weather which made going underfoot sticky in the extreme, while rain showers had us darting indoors for brews, and bailing early from working on both Good Friday and Saturday afternoons once we decided we had already gotten damp enough. It was the task that I had planned for the Easter weekend, and hopefully it will keep my parents on beans and carrots for a good few more years, but it absorbed the viable walking parts of three days, and while the morning of Easter Sunday was probably the clearest sustained period of the whole week, it was entirely absorbed with shoveling compost and doing dinner prep for all seven members of Family Wren, both of which turned out to require a lot more labouring than I had actually anticipated.

Easter Monday didn't even offer a nice end to my week Down Country with pounding rain allowing me no opportunity to get out for a stretch before heading homewards on the train, though we were thankfully spared the snow which swept across Derbyshire and Yorkshire before I traveled, but with a short week on the horizon, normal service would surely be resumed as April 7th came around. No such luck though, as on the Friday I felt my throat feeling rough again, and as the weekend cam on, I felt ill with exact same thing that knocked me out of the walking schedule back in March, and thus another weekend drops off the schedule and I look forward to another tough week at work as my cold doesn't grasp me hard enough to lay me up, but does fill my lungs with enough mucus and goo to keep me coughing for the full duration. The time off the trail has at least allowed me to get busy with writing out a paper journal of all my walks and associated statistics, something that I had been thinking about doing for at least two years, and finally gotten busy with over the last off season, but this last week I discovered a calculation error in my Solo mileage total, which had gone unnoticed since 2015 and thus meant that three years of my stats are wrong, claiming more solo miles than have been walked. That gets me worried that more of my addition might prove to be incorrect as I continue to transcribe six years worth of stats from rough papers into a properly formatted table, and thus I won't be sharing any solo mileage stats until I've gotten that sorted out, and realising that mistake, and all the work that I'd done in transcription was in error just leaves me feeling unnecessarily miserable. Still, I ought to end my griping with a reason to feel cheerful, and this is where I report my success in shedding some weight, having spent 6 years loitering at the top end of the 75-77 kilo bracket and complaining that walking has not aided me in getting any lighter over the same period, so after a long winter of feeling old and fat, my resolve for 2018 was finally set to shed some of this bulk in accompaniment to this walking season. So as February came around, I decided to eliminate passive snacking from my diet, and to stop chowing on biscuits, crisps and chocolate along with all my regular meals, and after getting a new and accurate pair of scales, I measured myself at 75.9k at the end of the month, and getting down to 73.5k at March's last weigh in, and while I've put a lot back on through the feedings I got at My parents' place, I've found that getting the weight down is possible, to the point that multiple colleagues of mine have noticed that I'm definitely carrying less bulk on my gut, and that I fit better in tailored shirts than I had done, and I look to resuming walking again in the Spring, hopeful than I might get down to a healthy weight of 70k as the season goes on.

5,000 Miles Cumulative Total: 3175.7 3179.7 miles
2018 Total: 67.2 miles
Up Country Total: 2887.9 2891.9 miles
Solo Total: ????.? 2900.7 miles
Miles in My 40s: 1773.5 miles

Nest Up: Spring must surely Spring...