Keeping that fitness promise we made to ourselves is hard.

In other words, right now, you are choosing to do a hard thing.

Welcome to Walking is Fitness.

This is a podcast of action, providing a little boost of motivation to keep that fitness promise you made to

yourself. Hi, I'm Dave. I've been walking for fitness since 2013, averaging just under 21,000

steps a day. I'm walking right now and would love to have you join me for the next 10 minutes or so.

A beautiful morning, early morning here in South Carolina, temperature 65 degrees, barely a wind. There is no threat of rain.

The sky is clear, although just ahead I've got some ground fog, which kind of adds to the mysterious feel of this early morning.

It's kind of fun walking in the fog.

And this, again, it's ground fog.

It's not super thick stuff that is causing people to have to slow down. So I was out walking, as I usually do,

the other day, and the sun was up. And I saw a raccoon, scooted across the road, maybe 50, 50 feet in

front of me from one side of the road to the other, and then he ran down into a gully and into a drainage pipe, a large drainage pipe. There was some water in there. It wasn't much, but I'm guessing he was

looking for food. But raccoons, of course, are nocturnal. And so, you know, you see them out

in the daytime, in the daylight, and it's a curiosity. It's also a warning sign to keep your distance.

But even so, raccoons at any time are, they're cute cartoon characters, but not the type of

animal you want to encounter.

And I had a situation a few years ago, lived in Maryland and was sitting on my back patio

and it was at night and two raccoons came on to the patio and I think they were just trying to get

from point A to point B and I happened to be in between and they saw me. They stopped. They were maybe 10 feet away from me.

And I had a fence behind me. No where to go. So it's like, I'm looking at them. They're looking

at me. I'm looking at them thinking, this could get interesting.

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