Five Ways To Make Your Walks Better
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How did Dave introduce walking's role in his mental health journey?
Today I want to talk about how walking alone is critical for my mental health. Hi, I'm Dave. Welcome to Walking is Fitness, a daily 10-minute podcast designed to provide you with a little added motivation to get out the door and take the walk. Today's 10-minute walk starts right after this. so the last seven years actually seven plus years have been really intense for Ava and me and to a large degree even more intense for Ava as you'll understand as I go through what we have walked through together but
What major life events over seven years set the context for these walks?
It's also been intense for me and what I want to talk about today is how walking alone has been critical in protecting my mental health during the past seven plus years which have been without question the most challenging years of my life. It started in 2018 in late summer early fall 2018 when Ava was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery, radiation treatment, and then she was put on medication, we thought, for five years. Well, that medication proved to have some side effects that really impacted Ava significantly. And after not even quite a year, the decision was made for Ava to go off that medication, which of course carries some risks. So there was that. During all of that, Ava's mom got cancer, was diagnosed with cancer, and she passed away a few months after that diagnosis.
In 2020, we spent most of the year, while the world was in shutdown because of the pandemic, our focus was on getting our house ready to sell so that we could move from Maryland to South Carolina. I left the morning show, being part of the morning team on the radio station, something I had wanted to do since I was a teenager. This was my decision. That doesn't mean it was an easy decision, but that came to an end. We moved the day after I got down here to South Carolina. Ava was in a car crash, in the hospital for a week, in a wheelchair for two months. Then she developed diverticulitis so severe that she had to have surgery to correct that. So that was multiple months of her suffering prior to the surgery and then recovering after the surgery.
There was a jury trial related to the accident, us against our insurance company. Ava's father had dementia, Alzheimer's. He lived a half mile away. His health was slowly getting worse, and he died last fall. There was a significant policy change at the radio station where I work that required a hard decision on my part. There was also another surgery that Ava had to endure. We're not entirely sure, but we believe that that situation was a result of the radiation, the treatment for the breast cancer. So there's been a lot going on. And that's not everything. But those are pretty much the big headlines. And so there's been a lot going on. It's been very stressful. It's been very challenging. It's been very hard.
I am an introvert. I'm an extreme introvert. And one of the best definitions I've heard defining the difference between introverts and extroverts, it's not that introverts don't like people and extroverts really like people. Not that at all.
But it's more about energy, energy drain, recharging. Introverts recharge when they're alone.
Extroverts recharge being around other people. So as an introvert, I need alone time to recharge. And it's not just recharging. There are other aspects to alone time that have been really, really important. And over the past seven plus years, getting out and walking alone, I believe has protected my mental health. And here are five reasons. Number one, that alone time did allow me to recharge. It also allowed me to process, to think through. Introverts tend to be more introspective. We are in our heads a lot. I needed that time alone walking to process, to think through what's going on, the implications, to understand context, to also use those walks as opportunities for gratitude. Because even when things were going wrong, even when something was going sideways, there were still many things.
lots of things that I could be grateful for. And those walks helped me to focus on that. So that's number one. Number two, you could argue that, all right, you need alone time to process, to be grateful and all the things.
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