An Active Retirement

  We have all heard the above phrase,and those of us that have been promoted to WAGS from AWW's are certainly participants in this lifestyle. Even though the onset of retirement is a distant memory for most, we have certainly kept it going, with either the gritty determination to prolong our lot, or because we have invested in some exercise machine to motivate ourselves. By this most of us mean a dog.
    However both Myriam and I have been dogless for a number of years, and while she has the gritty determination to exercise to exhaustion most days, alas I am in the  procrastination camp, and need both stick and carrot to persevere.
    Now those ingenious marketing people, who gave us geocaching as a reason to use a GPS have weighed in with numerous motivational activity devices.
     These first impinged on my consciousness in the days even before handheld GPS, as a pedometer, and there was a little lacklustre marketing, urging us to set personal targets, and purchase one of these unreliable little gadgets to hang on our belts in an attempt to quantify the amount of walking we did.
They were set to a standard pace length, taking no account of uphill shortened steps, downhill lengthened steps and no information whatever on altitude gained or lost, weight or age. An average walk could have been 20% out in terms of distance measured.
     Everything has changed now with the advent of the smartphone and Fitness and Health Apps. I won't go into unnecessary detail here, but suffice it to say that all the major players have either Android Apps, iOS Apps or both so that merely by carrying your phone it can record with a fair amount of precision, how far you have been, where you have been, how much you have climbed and descended, how fast you did it, and the measurement of various bodily functions such as heartrate, breathing rate, blood pressure, oxygen concentration in your blood, and even how you react to an attractive young person walking past. Well perhaps not the last, but it can't be far off.'
      The stakes have recently been upped with the slick marketing of 'wearables' by which I mean gadgets or clothing that can be worn either communicating instantly with your smart phone, with the ability to download data later or with the ultimate self contained device that can retain and display more than you could ever wish to know about your Áctivity'. Moreover a good proportion of them measure a statistic of which we are all conscious - the amount we sleep, and the type of sleep we get.
     All this culminates in the Smart Watch, such as Apple have recently released at the usual premium price.  As a pensioner with limited means, I am not concerned with this end of the market.  Smart watches and their less complicated siblings, Activity Bands come in a huge and confusing range of prices and features .
    At the economic end are such devices as the Xiaomi Mi-Fit band, which I recently purchased via Amazon, set up, tested for a week and passed on to Myriam for prolonged testing. Xiaomi, though not familiar to most of us in UK or Portugal is the No. 1 company for phones and other electronic devices in China, which makes it very big. Their products are characteristically  high performance and good value for the money.
    What I found was the key to these devices is that they are almost as motivational as a dog for getting you up and out, except that you are not forced to do it at inconvenient hours nor in inclement weather. They are also wonderfully optimistic about your performance.

Xiaomi Mi-Fit Band

      You can set your daily target number of steps,and the band obligingly vibrates when you reach that figure.  It is light and irritates less than a watch. And I paid 16 quid for it including postage. Only once during a week's trial did I have to set off deliberately later in the day to achieve the target of 8000 steps, as I had been driving most of that day. This one also tracks your sleeping hours and how much of that is considered deep sleep, based on movement sensors, but does not measure your track nor vertical movement. All data is displayed on the dedicated free App on your phone tablet or computer after being synchronised via Bluetooth.
    There are many choices, depending on your personal peccadilloes and budget, and whether you have a smart phone or require a standalone. My next will be the Withings Activite Pop, but only because I am stylish and already have my BP Monitor connected to the Withings Health App.!

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The Old and the New

A very select (insert suitable collective noun here) of  four WAGS gathered at approximately 1030 in the forenoon, for what was to be the hottest walk of the year to date.  One Senior WAG had not read, remembered or absorbed the content of Rod's calling email, and so had turned up at about 0915. He shall remain nameless, but appears in a photo below in disguise. Peter Schroeder turned up in mufti, but only to deliver some plates to Rod, as he was heading North a bit later.

The walk eventually started at about 1050 hrs, by which time we determined that no one else was turning up. after an absorbing discussion, mainly about Myriam's Xiaoi Mi Mi-Fit Activity Band.

   Mindful of sensibilities about length and changes in altitude, we had a fairly level couple of kilometres, until Rod democratically offered the option to climb to a ridge, where we might take better advantage of the breeze, which proposal was carried unanimously, as it was becoming fairly hot in the valley, with the evil east wind.

     We happened on a ruin, where Rod opined that there had been one of the famous Blue Blobs, used by Maurice to mark the Algarve Way. A closer inspection revealed that not only was there a faint blue blob on the wall, but also the updated Cistus Symbol.

Two WAGS chained to a wall by a member of Al Qaeda

   The Man in the Mask secures the WAGS by both fingers

You will have to look very hard to see the marks.

The walk continued gently, and in view of the energy sapping heat, which was apparently over 30C, we turned early for home. Total Distance 10.71 km, time 3hrs 20 minutes. Myriam well exceeded her target of 8000 steps according to Mi-Fit, by achieving in excess of 20,000 steps during the day. An excellent snack lunch was had at a new venue, Namaste in Lagos.

Raoul Vaneigem on blogs

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.