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I was brought up in the water, and my parents encouraged me to do swimming lessons as a kid. I took it all the way up to my closed-water lifeguard prep, Bronze Cross, and Bronze Medallion. Though I don’t swim a lot these days, it is nice to be able to go to the beach and swim out a good distance without having to worry about whether my feet can touch the bottom.

I can only speak for myself, but I found that just walking was hard to pull off. I’d get bored and lose my motivation too quickly. I had been meaning to get a good digital camera and get back into photography, and since I got my camera I’ve walked at least 5km per day - and that’s just on work days! Today is the first weekend day with the camera, and I’m already up and out of bed, with plans of going to Burnaby Mountain - I’ll likely walk more than 10km today.

Another thing I found that helps is having some idea of how far you’ve walked. I often walk Vancouver’s Stanley Park Seawall, and it’s nice to pass a distance marker. “Hey, I’ve walked 7.5km! Sweet!” It makes the 10km walk seem to fly by.

One hint for other diabetics: keep an eye on your blood glucose for a couple of hours after the walk. I find that even if I finish the walk with normal levels, they can drop quite a bit in the couple of hours after the walk. This caught me off-guard, anyway.

I used to live in Hay River, Northwest Territories, Canada. We got the aurora pretty darn good up there—it’s beautiful! It’s not every night, and most of the time it isn’t terribly vivid or interesting. However, every now and then it makes up for the rest of the time.