Hi friends. Welcome to Walking is Fitness, a podcast designed to help you transform your life by walking more and walking more intentionally.

Right now, I am walking in my basement. That, by the way, is our furnace.

Oil-based heat. It's wonderful. Feels great. So this week, I have a story to tell you, and I'm not going to give it away right now, but I will tell you that the story takes place where I am right now.

And it involves an activity that I'm doing right now. And of course, it's far more than that. All right,

if you're ready for a little story, a little Christmas story, let's get started.

Two years ago today, I needed to figure out the perfect gift, but sadly, I'm really bad at doing this.

Gift giving is a skill that I don't possess, and honestly, it's a skill I don't even want.

Life is actually much easier when you suck at giving gifts because the expectations that people place on you are super low.

And then one day, it really matters. And that day for me was

December 23, 2018. Eva, my wife, was in the final days of her radiation treatments for breast

cancer. One of the side effects is deep fatigue. This is the kind of fatigue that makes

you want to sleep all the time, but even when you do, you still feel tired. Thankfully, the fatigue

lifts gradually after the treatments are done. But a couple of days before Christmas in 2018,

they weren't done yet,

and my wife was really feeling it. Typically, my Christmas gift to Ava is a marathon race. She's a runner, and she loves long-distance events. She'd pick the race, and I'd pay for the registration,

and a couple of nights at a hotel if the race was

out of state. It was perfect. She got a gift she liked and I didn't have to think about it.

Because of her cancer treatment, we decided to change it up and do something together as our gift

to each other. It would be decided later what that was, which meant I was off the hook

again, which also meant I had a perfect opportunity. It had been a rough year for Ava, and a special

surprise Christmas gift I knew would mean a lot to her. So I decided to make that happen.

And I felt really good until I realized that was the easy

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