Yeah, I know it’s not July any more. The month ended in a flurry of activity during which I was too busy to complete any posts, so my first job for August is to wrap up July. Bear with me!

A few years ago, I started thinking of my daily walk as a crude analog to the wandering of our African savannah ancestors in pursuit of game and other food stuffs. They probably spent several hours every day chasing after or rooting around for their next meal, and the one after that, and the one after that. There are three grocery stores within a half a mile of where I pitch my tent, so I don’t have to wander in search of food. But evolution optimized my body and my mind for this movement; walking makes me alert and curious, ready to chase after whatever prey appears on the horizon.

Here in the Information Age, the object of my foraging is ideas. I make my living by collecting, arranging, curating, packaging, explaining, and selling ideas. I need fresh ones every day, and I often capture them while I’m hunting and gathering at the park. While I was taking the 50/50 writing workshop a couple of years ago, I discovered that if I read the day’s prompt before heading out for my evening walk, I’d often come home with a story or essay ready to write. During the present month-long blogging project, I spent many walks turning over post ideas in my head, then came home to write them out.

If my primitive metaphor isn’t enough to make you feel like moving, then take a look at a few headlines I scavenged: Aerobic Exercise Grows Brain Cells; Exercise Grows New Brain Cells; Mental Benefits of Walking; Stronger, Faster, Smarter. We’ve always known that working out was good for the body, but there’s a lot of new scientific evidence pointing toward the benefits of exercise for the brain.

Do you use your brain? Do you want to keep it fit until you’re done using it? Do your 21st-century lifestyle and career require you to trade in ideas? Get your body moving, and your brain will get stronger. And don’t worry—the Information Age will still be here when you get back to the computer.

About a year ago, a business development client and good friend said to me, “I love my job, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing, my whole life is perfectly on track except for this one thing: I’m fat, and it makes me miserable.”

My answer was, “Well, I guess we know what to work on next.”

She picked a bad time to get me fired up about a new project—the second week of August. She’s not a big fan of Houston summer heat. But she somehow pushed through her reluctance and let me drag her out to Memorial Park for her first walk in recent memory on Monday, August 17, 2009. She was miserable—hot, tired, flushed, and running with sweat—and she made sure I knew it. About two-thirds of the way around, she asked if we could stop to rest. We parked ourselves on a bench for a few minutes.

It became a weekly routine. I never pushed her to establish a specific day or time, and in return, she usually spared me the excuses when I knew she had an evening free and I’d call to ask, “Up for a walk?” She made it through the brutal August and September heat to the payoff of a long, lovely fall. We started working in an extra day every once in a while. She scaled back the whining. I don’t think she was significantly less miserable, but she’d come to realize that the complaining wouldn’t do any good with me as her trainer.

When I started walking two laps around the park in the atypical cold last December, we modified our routine. I’d walk the first lap, then she’d meet me at the stretching area and join in on the second one. I tried always to acknowledge the effort it took her to get out there after nightfall in the cold and damp. By the time we’d extended her at-least-once-a-week streak into the spring of 2010, she’d quit needing a rest stop.

Now she’s coming up on the anniversary of the program. She reported to me tonight that although she hasn’t lost any substantial amount of weight, for the first time in a decade, she’s no heavier than she was a year ago. And there are more signs of progress: we’re making the laps in less time, she’s not experiencing as much next-day soreness as she did at the start, and she made it all the way through last winter without ever getting seriously ill. She’d been laid up for a week or two with bronchitis or bad chest colds at least once each of the previous three winters.

I’m very proud of her.

Right before we started her on the once-a-week program, I wrote her a long e-mail pep talk. I tracked down that message tonight to check whether my advice turned out to be any good. Here’s part of that message (emphasis added):

Don’t be discouraged by the slow pace of progress. The goals you’re going to be setting are for a lifetime, but it’s a healthier, more fulfilling, more satisfying, more pain-free, more energetic lifetime, and it will be worth the work…. [W]e didn’t get ourselves overweight in a year of bad habits, so we’re not going to fix the problem with a year of good habits. But making a few incremental changes in our lives—more good foods, more good habits, a little more dancing, a little more walking, some other fun activities that you’ll discover later—can change the trajectory and get us where we want to go.

Gayle, if you’re reading, congratulations! I’ll see you at the park one day soon.

Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

At the end of last November, in an effort to jump-start a weight-loss regimen that had stalled, I made up my mind to walk twice around the loop at Memorial Park every day for the month of December. November 30 was a Monday, so I started one day early for good measure. The next day, just in time for my “official” December Project kickoff, the weather turned nasty for two solid weeks. December 1, it was raining and 45 degrees by evening. Then a cooling trend set in. By Thursday, there was talk of snow. I woke up Friday morning to moderate flurries.

At first, denial seemed like a comfortable attitude toward the weather. It wasn’t as if I could do anything about it. But a friend called mid-morning to warn me that it would get progressively worse as the day wore on. “If you must go, you should do it soon.” So I bundled up in two or three layers of shirts, a scarf, knit cap, a windbreaker, and my warmest running shorts. I give up the shorts when the weather gets so cold that ice starts to form on my skin, and not a minute sooner.

Snow was beginning to accumulate when I arrived at Memorial Park. There were plenty of parking spaces to choose from. In the course of 6½ miles, I encountered perhaps a dozen other people. Half of those were sightseers. They’d pull off the road, get out of the car, look at the falling snow—and the crazy man in the shorts—for a few minutes, and then get back in the car and take off in search of somewhere warm.

But the other half…those were my tribe! I recognized some of them as park regulars. With one in particular, a man in his late 50s, I’d had a mutual smile-and-nod pact for a year or two. But on that snowy December morning, I looked up to see him coming toward me with a big grin on his face. It felt like the right moment to solidify our bond, so as soon as we were within earshot, I said, “It’s days like this when you find out who’s serious.”

He said, “Hey, I’m from Colorado. This is like a nice spring day.” We shared the laugh and went our separate ways. A mile and a half later, we met again in front of the tennis center. We compared notes on which parts of our bodies had gone completely numb. There was a look of pride and satisfaction in his eyes that felt familiar.

When we were ready to break for our cars, he said, “See you tomorrow?”

I said, “Count on it.”

If you find something you love doing that’s good for your health, your self‑esteem, your sanity, and your spirit, you might become obsessed. It’s okay. You’ll be in good company.

We’re down to the last five days of the month. I woke up this morning thinking how easy it is to run out of steam right at the end of a project like this, and wondering what extra effort I might need to put forth to get the rest of the way to the goal, which was to give time and attention to this blog every day in July.

I was also thinking about how I’ve struggled for the last couple of months to get rid of the weight I gained while I recuperated after my eye surgeries. I’m close to that goal, but the last couple of pounds are hanging on tight. I’ve been banging away on my exercise routine as hard as ever, but with a lot going on in my work world, I’ve stumbled in the commitment to eat well. Too much snacking, too many poor choices, too many stray calories. Not enough veggies, whole grains, and lean meats.

So I asked myself, “What can I do with the five remaining days of July?” I have ideas for a few more blog posts. We’ll see if it’s enough to carry me across the finish line. But what else can I do in my sprint toward the end of the month? I decided to turn my focus to the practice I call “eating with intentionality.” For the last five days of July, I plan to pay more careful attention than ever to every bite of food or drop of drink that goes in my mouth. I’ll write it all down, and I’ll take my own advice about making sure that I eat only when I’m hungry. It’s a challenge. But we’re talking about five days. I know that I can do this for five days.

What’s the goal you’re working on? What could you accomplish toward that goal if you gave it everything you’ve got for five days? Ignore all the distractions—it’s only five days, after all—and give your time and attention to the facet of your life that needs them most right now. Five days of eating well, five days of exercising at your full capacity, five days of writing poetry, or making art, or doing yoga, or cooking nutritious meals.

Then come back here to the comments area and share with us what you’ve done.

Once in a while, everything comes together to create the perfect walk. There was an afternoon in Los Angeles in January of last year. I’d spent the day in a conference listening to brilliant people talk about their hopes for the future of human progress. I was high on contagious optimism and altruism. One of my new friends offered to show me the way to Griffith Park. I followed her through rush-hour traffic up into the hills, then she showed me where to park and where the running trail started. As I walked and jogged, the sun went down over the hills on one side and the San Gabriel Mountains faded to deep purple on the other. James Taylor sang “That’s Why I’m Here” on my iPod. I break into a grin from ear to ear / and suddenly it’s perfectly clear. It was an ecstatic moment. I’m sure that my feet never touched the ground.

And I recall an early spring day at Memorial Park in some recent year. Dappled sunlight was coming through the deciduous trees, just beginning to fill in with tender yellow-green leaves. The breeze was warm, and I knew it would only be a few weeks until it was too hot to walk at midday. But on this day, the sun felt great on my pasty-white skin. The soundtrack: Indigo Girls, “The Wood Song.” No one gets to miss the storm of what will be / just holding on for the ride. And for a moment, maybe 30 seconds, everything seemed to make complete and perfect sense. Friends I’d made, and lost, the ebb and flow of my career and my love life, the passage of time, the inevitability of change—I understood it all. And then I guess the sun went behind a cloud, and I was back to trudging along on sore feet.

But these moments and a few others are always with me. They remind me that the reward for hard work comes in many forms. There’s the delight of buying the next smaller size of clothing, the knowledge that I’m steadily improving my health, and once in a while, moments of ecstatic happiness.

In writing and exercise, sometimes there are moments of pure, unadulterated joy, and no amount of struggle seems too much to endure.

But on the other hand…

I received a note this morning from a Facebook friend who’s struggled as hard with weight loss for most of her adult life as I have. She asked, “Can you send me some of you exercise motivation magic? [I’ve] fallen off the wagon…. The battle never seems to end.”

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I wrote back to say that I know the feeling very well, but that somehow it’s helped to stop thinking about fitness in those terms. I’ve tried to make exercise part of who I am—not a short-term project, and not a battle, either. Her words stayed with me all day: the battle never seems to end.

Last weekend I happened to catch an interview with Valerie Bertinelli on CBS News Sunday Morning in which the 49-year-old actress talked about losing 45 pounds, and about her efforts to come to terms with why she gained the weight in the first place. She mentioned plans to run a marathon, and the interviewer chose to sum up the story using a race metaphor: “For Valerie Bertinelli, it’s unclear when—or if—she’ll ever cross the finish line.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words. The commitment to be healthy isn’t a race, and there’s no finish line.

If we are to thrive, if we are to make the changes we want in our lives, we have to teach ourselves to think about what we’re doing in different terms. Health is not a battle to be fought, and it’s not a race to be run. It’s valuing and nurturing your body every step of the way—not just until you cross an imaginary finish line or vanquish an illusory foe. Fitness is a journey, not a destination. Every time you take a step along that path, you’ve won.

For the queen bee, and also everyone else

Image: Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

You have a lot of priorities to juggle. You do what you can, you assign degrees of urgency based on trying to find some kind of balance between what you want and need and what the people who depend on you—your family, your friends, your co-workers, your boss, your clients—want and need. And with a little luck, you get all of the most critically important things taken care of on any given day. Or maybe you don’t, but at least you get to them the same week. Or maybe you don’t, but you do what you can do, and it has to be enough…right?

And while you’re working on all of that, be sure to take care of yourself. Like the man said, “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.” Get some rest, drink plenty of fluids. Stay out of the hot sun. Let someone take care of you for a while.