Walking Alone To Protect My Mental Health
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Why does Dave start his episode by emphasizing the importance of walking alone for mental health?
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. I am on my back porch with a box I just got from Topo Athletic. These contain my new shoes, the ST6. These are minimal shoes, wide toe box. All the Topo Athletic shoes come with a wide toe box. My shoes have a zero drop. This is part of a journey I've been on to make my feet stronger, to move towards a more minimal shoe. With Topo Athletic, they've got shoes for every need. Minimal shoes, maximal cushion. They've got road shoes, trail shoes, recovery shoes, race shoes.
All right, let's open the box. And there's a box inside the box and these are nice looking and very light, very light. Let's pull the inserts out, try them on. Boy, I can feel the difference the wide toe box makes instantly. By the way, Topo Athletic, brand new sponsor of Walking is Fitness. You can check them out. Again, topoathletic.com.
What details does Dave share about his new Topo Athletic shoes and why they matter for his walks?
You can do your shopping online. You can also see where you can pick up Topo shoes at a retailer near you. All right, leaving the back porch. Walking in and yeah, this wide toe box makes a huge difference. So I'm going to be wearing these and I'll give you an update shortly. In the meantime, check them out. Topo Athletic, T-O-P-O, topoathletic.com.
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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. 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.
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