Geocaching – The Climb #795

Tuesday 27^th April 2021

One of the things all this mountain of work has stopped me doing is getting out and about and combating my lack of exercise during the pandemic. Gyms have been mostly closed for the last year and when they have been open I’ve not been in mind to visit them whilst still not vaccinated.

Couple this with some external issues with my chronic illness being sent into a nosedive, and I’ve spent the last 6 months really just trying to get things back under control.

As a consequence, I’m fat, unfit, still partially unwell (although better than I have been) and have a mountain to climb in terms of fitness.

I know from Leggeddon I can do this but it takes baby steps. And for me that means walking round the block regularly.

Usually I’ll couple this with some plot problem and then put on my headphones and think about the problem as I walk. But the type of work I’ve been doing recently has meant that I’ve not really had any plot problems. Even with my detailed outline, I’ve got everything sorted with a nice new Excel grid charting all the various plot threads.

So finding the incentive to get out regularly has been an issue. I walk to my Support Bubble and back each day so it’s not like I’m not getting some form of daily exercise but I need to up the distance.

So today I did my first Geocache in years.

I’m not sure why – other than the fact that moving disrupts your patterns – but I’ve not properly geocached in years. Friends and family I used to do this with have developed serious illness and so perhaps there’s a bit of guilt in doing this for myself.

And it’s possibly because I’m coming back from a spate of chronic illness that I decided to do it. Selfishly, unlike friends and family, I can get better – I can bring my chronic illness under control. And if I can get better, so I can geocache again.

Or perhaps I was just going back to those old methods that got me motivated into going out regularly and helped me raise my fitness back up.

Either way, I did my first geocache in years today. It was local and on my regular walk round the block route. I was a little rusty but I found it, signed it, tried to remember where I’d taken it from and replace it. Then I doused my hands in sanitiser and carried on my walk.

Not sure if it was the heat or the excitement of the cache but when I got home I was knackered. That’s one of the most difficult parts for me, things that were trivial a year ago now leave me feeling exhausted for the rest of the day.

I don’t plan to do one every day, but my plan is to have a range of things to incentivise me to get me out more regularly: geocaches, Pokemon Go gyms, Munzees, whatever.

It’s great I’ve been working hard but I can sometimes get lost in the work. That’s one of the reasons I go to my Support Bubble each day – it’s a reason to stop working and take a break.

I’d like to get out again before the end of the week, but there’s rain forecast and surprisingly, walking home from my support bubble last night, it was quite heavy. Hopefully Thursday and Friday, I can get out again.

The plus side of not having cached in 5 years: there’s a lot of caches unfound around me!