Ending the streak

In 2025, I gave up a few hobbies.

For three years, I walked five miles every day; I never missed a day. I walked in the morning before I had surgery, and against the advice of my surgeon, I walked the day after. I walked with injuries. I walked when I was sick and when I didn't feel like it. I kept walking. To quit walking would be a personal failure.

I was having anxiety about breaking my walking streak. During the COVID years, I had walked 499 days straight before food poisoning caused an infectious colitis, and the Cipro given to treat it tried to kill me. It caused tendonitis, and my knees blew up like balloons, and I couldn't turn my head. I was trying to explain to the doctor in the ER that I had walked for 499 days and that my streak was broken, and he just looked at me and said, "What do you want me to write a please excuse note?" I was so offended. There’s no way anybody could fix it. My streak was lost. What the heck was a note Gonna do?

My walking mattered to no one but me.

When I finally recovered and resumed walking, I rebuilt my streak—and when I reached 1,000 days, I became increasingly anxious about missing a day.

If I had gotten too sick to walk, forgotten to wear my Fitbit, or missed walking a day, I would have felt like a personal failure.

It was a strange realization because no one else cared about my streak but me. It held no significance for anyone else on this planet. Yet, the thought of losing it caused real stress.

That’s when I understood walking had fulfilled its original purpose. I had formed the habit. I genuinely enjoyed walking. What I no longer needed was the pressure of forcing myself to walk five miles every single day.

I also began to recognize what walking wasn’t giving me anymore. I needed better balance, posture, and coordination, so I decided to incorporate yoga into my routine rather than treating walking as the only acceptable form of exercise.

There was another change. After the dog attack, while walking, I experienced a posttraumatic stress response to walking in my neighborhood. I still kept walking, with a broken hand, bruised hip, and injured leg. I couldn’t stop, but the anxiety increased. Every time I took the dogs out, I scanned for other dogs. My body stayed tense. Walking with them no longer felt relaxing—it felt vigilant. That drained much of my joy. It was the third time Odie had been attacked in the neighborhood, but the first time I suffered serious injury.

I quit walking with the dogs. I would walk alone because I didn’t feel I could keep my dogs safe. My dogs would look at me with sad eyes every time I left them.

So I made a decision. I chose a day to end my three-year streak—not to feel like a failure, but to mark a completion.

On December 17, the third anniversary of walking, I stopped.

And stopping felt like an achievement.