Steps

It is not up to me to pass judgement on his faculties, but the last President of the United States was allegedly keen on expressing the rather pleasing view that, since we only have a limited number of heartbeats available, it is foolish to indulge in strenuous exercise.

Other more prosaic intellects have arrived at the rival theory that this is bollocks, and that you simply have enough heartbeats to last you until you die, whatever that may be from. At 80 beats per minute, and an average lifespan of around eighty years, that looks like about 3.5 billion to me. The idea that my body is capable of doing 3.5 billion anythings makes me curiously proud. People get knighthoods for less, especially if they donate large amounts of money to the Conservative Party.

I was idly wondering if the same applies to steps.

I generally walk around 12,500 steps a day which, when multiplied across, say, 65 active walking years, comes to around 300 million. I am about to blow a full two million of those on a walk from Lymington to Cape Wrath, which any half-decent mathematician will tell you is costing me about three months of walking at the far end of my life.

This matters, because I am currently trying to work out how much I should train for a walk that I have recently realised starts in 47 days. The various websites that I have consulted, whilst they agree on precious little else, seem to conclude that in undertaking this challenge, I am an ‘elite athlete’; this delights me a lot, although it would probably confuse Captain Whitely, my PE teacher at school, one of whose reports announced delightedly that I was ‘keeping my end up in the bottom group’, a star that I have cheerfully hitched myself to for the intervening fifty years. Until now.

Elite athletes share their secrets very sparingly, and generally only when they have retired, especially on Desert Island Discs. I come from more public spirited stock, so here goes.

I have dumped an eight kilo bag of spuds into a two kilo rucksack and, everywhere I go, it goes. Consequently, I walk the dogs round the vineyard looking like Bear Grylls; at night, you may find me walking up and down the rows of vines (there are 125 of them, and each row if 330 metres, so go work that one out) until I get bored, which is surprisingly soon. Last Sunday, I probably became the only elite athlete in history to get called back home because his rucksack contained a third of the ingredients of our Sunday lunch, but I roll with the punches. All of this has only got me up to about 16,500 steps a day (the walk will average out at 40,000), but I suppose that I can say that I am used to carrying weights again. I have also declared a moratorium on booze and chocolates until England next win a test match, which means that it could be a long summer.

Give generously, if not to the curlews for whom I am walking, (https://www.curlewaction.org/roger/), then for the general hope that I can get myself fit in time.

A bottle of 16 years old Lagavullin beckons from the Far Side.