I'm going to do a thoughtful debrief on one of my 2025 goals. Hi, I'm Dave. Welcome to

Walking as Fitness, a daily 10-minute podcast designed to provide you with a little added

motivation to get out the door, take the walk, and more importantly, to keep going, to build a life-changing habit.

Today's 10-minute walk starts right after this.

That, my friends, is a heron in flight.

Herons are not pretty sounding birds, in my opinion. So here we are,

two days after Christmas. We have five days remaining in the year, and I'll have my math right

27th today, 28, 29, 30, yes, five days left in 2025, and then we start a new year. This is one of my favorite

weeks of the year. I'm a goals nerd, and if you've been listening for a long time, you've

heard me talk about goals, sometimes not in a really positive way, particularly New Year's goals,

New Year's resolutions, because, and this is from personal experience, they are set in

what I call a vat of emotion.

I'm excited about the things I'm going to do in the upcoming new year.

And I keep listing these things that I'm going to accomplish.

And inevitably, most of these things don't happen.

So I've become a cynic of goals. And the tension remains, I'm still a

goal's nerd. I love sitting down, thinking about the future, and writing goals down. And this week,

between Christmas and New Year's, is when I typically take time away from the house, from regular responsibility.

Usually I head to a coffee shop. When we lived in Maryland, I would drive into D.C., go to my favorite coffee shop, Ebeneasers, which is about a block from Union Station and sit there

for an hour or two thinking dreaming writing and then I'd go for a long walk

through DC sometimes as many as 20,000 steps pondering what I had just

written down and then heading back to Ebeneasers and making some

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