Because I use wearables to capture as much information about myself as possible, I can go back and see how my illness affected my activity.

Graph of my walking distance for the month of October.

Between returning home from vacation in August, and getting sick in late September, I averaged between 6 and 8 miles a day, mostly walking the dog. (Separately I got in a run each week, pushing that day’s mileage up over 10.) In October (as you can see above) my distance fell to between 3 and 4 miles each day until just about the middle of the month, then gradually started increasing. I exceeded 6 miles on October 15th. I didn’t reach 8 miles until October 30th.

Now I’m right back to 6 to 8 miles a day, same as before I was sick. And today I went for my first run since September 26th. It was a pretty crappy run, but better than not running.

Today I managed to get in a workout—my first since coming down with West Nile fever five and a half weeks ago. (I dropped the weight by 33%, and dropped the set count by almost 50%, but I did do the whole workout I’d planned.)

I was only really sick for about 3 weeks, but oof—it has sure taken a long time to go from “mostly better” to “well enough to exercise.” The past two and a half weeks just fixing breakfast and walking the dog left me so tired I had to take a nap.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to regular exercise now, and go back to sword fighting!

As someone who just spent five weeks recovering from West Nile Fever, this article spoke to me:

climate change will result in the infectious disease dengue becoming endemic in parts of Europe and the United States,

Source: WHO chief scientist warns of endemic dengue in Europe, US – POLITICO

(Dengue and West Nile virus are both in the same family, along with Zika and Yellow Fever.)

Via Bruce Sterling.