Opening Day!

0:00Have you ever noticed how many of your favorite memories also involve walking? Hi, I'm Dave. Welcome to Walking His Fitness, a daily 10-minute podcast designed to provide you with a little added motivation to get out the door, take the walk and to build a life-changing walking habit. Today's 10-minute walk starts right after this. So, my son sent me a text showing me how big his tax refund is this year. There was a time where a refund that big would have actually had a negative impact on our finances because I would have gotten sloppy with our spending. Thanks to Monarch, that season, now in the review mirror, simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. Brings your entire financial life of budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth, future planning, all together in one dashboard on your phone or laptop.

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2:01Take a break from your regular routine but stay consistent with your health. AG1 provides easy support with travel packs to celebrate the adventure. AG1 next-gen delivers five strains of clinically-studied probiotics that have been shown to support digestion, immune function and alleviate occasional bloating. And since I started using AG1, I also feel a boost in my energy. And AG1 is an easy habit to build. One scoop in eight ounces of water each morning. Go to drinkag1.com slash walking pod to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of item in D3 plus K2 for free in your AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. Only while supplies last, that's drinkag1.com slash walking pod. Today's episode is happening as I'm walking through the parking lot of Pelicans Stadium. This is where the Myrtle Beach Pelicans play.

3:03They're a minor league baseball team, single A. If you know baseball, they're affiliated with the Chicago Cubs. I thought this would be an appropriate place for today's episode because today is opening day for most of the major league baseball teams, including my favorite team, the Baltimore Orioles. Now before you get either concerned or excited that today's episode is all about baseball, concerned because you're not a fan and you would find this boring. It's not going to be all about baseball. If you like baseball, there are people far more knowledgeable than me who can provide more interesting analysis of the upcoming season. But here's what I want to talk about. The big picture is how many of our memories also involve walking. Not so much as we're doing it for exercise, but just it's a part of life.

4:03I'm excited about the upcoming season. I'm excited about today's game because I'm a big fan. Big fan of the Orioles grew up in Merrill and just outside of Baltimore. I became a fan when I was a kid. And even though we're now 500 miles south, I still follow the Orioles. Every game, watch a lot of them. And even try to get to Maryland once a season to take in a game in person to camp in yards. And I've got a lot of memories involving baseball. And I'm actually a little surprised how many of those memories involve walking, for example. I think this one was 12 or 13 years ago. I took our youngest Emma to see the Orioles play. It was her first game. And I was still part of the morning show. And that morning, while we were on the air, I was talking about going to see the Orioles at night.

5:07And that I was taking Emma to her first game. And I don't remember everything we talked about, but we did at least one, maybe two breaks about that. And break, by the way, is radio talk for when the music stops and the announcer start talking, we call those breaks. So I did a couple of breaks talking about taking Emma to the Orioles game. Fast forward, we go to the game. We park at the furthest parking lot from the stadium that's associated with the stadium complex. It was the cheapest lot. It was about a mile away. And so Emma, me, and Eva, my wife, her mom, were walking to the stadium, having a good time. I think the weather was nice. And we get to the stadium itself. We're across the street. And we're standing there because the office or police officer is allowing traffic to go by. And we're talking, I don't know what we were talking about.

6:08And the people who were standing in front of us also going to the game waiting to cross the road. Turn around, and one of them, a woman says, are you Dave Paul? And I said, yes, ma'am. She said, is this your daughter, Emma? I said, yes, ma'am. We heard you talking about her on the radio this morning. We are so excited to be able to meet you, to meet her. And we hope she has an amazing time at the game tonight. Like, changes? We cross? They go off? My daughter is like, floored. It was a rock star moment for me as a dad. I loved it. I still think about it. She still mentions it, and it happened as we were walking to watch a baseball game.

7:10My older son, older son, actually, Christopher, a huge baseball fan. We got a lot of memories going to games, went to the Hall of Fame, up in Cooperstown, actually did that twice. But there was a game that we went to as probably more than 10 years ago. Maybe 15 years ago, I can't remember precisely. It was when the Orioles were really bad, and the downside of following a team that's really bad is, well, they're really bad. The upside is, attendance is way down, so you can make last minute decisions to go to a game and get good seats. And so we did that. I think they were playing the New York Yankees, and we thought, hey, let's go to the game. Last minute decision, we drive into the city, parking that parking lot that's a mile away, pay the eight bucks. Walk to the stadium, we're excited about the baseball game.

8:10Knowing that the Orioles are probably going to lose, but there's just something that's special about watching a game, especially Camden Yards, which is one of the best stadiums in all of Major League Baseball. It's a great way to spend a few hours on a summer night, regardless of whether your team wins or loses. So we get to the box office, and we're told, sorry, game sold out. It's like, what? Game sold out. Well, what we didn't take into account, because the Orioles are playing the Yankees, New York is only three hours away, and they're a lot of Yankee fans, that would come down to Baltimore to watch their team. Some even said it was easier doing that than going to Yankee Stadium and watching a game. So that particular night, game was sold out, and it was both frustrating and funny, as we're leaving the stadium complex, seeing fans wearing the Yankees jerseys going into our stadium.

9:16I still laugh about that, get a kick over that. One of my favorite things to do is anytime I'm watching a baseball game in person, go to a stadium, is I'll walk around the stadium, explore the stadium, and some stadiums, like Camden Yards, they have walkways inside the seating area, where you can actually walk around the entire stadium and watch the game as you're walking, which allows you to see the game from different perspectives, and I love doing that. I've been out to San Francisco, and watched the Giants at their stadium, also a beautiful stadium right on the bay, and I ever forget walking out in the right field area, and to my left is the playing field. And to my right is a body of water, they call it McCovie's cove, and there are a bunch of people in kayaks, just kind of floating there waiting for a home run ball to come out, and a couple of them had little habatches in their kayaks,

10:19or grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, that was fun. But probably my favorite memory that involves walking and baseball happened when I was 10 years old. It's still a little inconceivable to me that this happened, but I didn't even know baseball existed until I was nine years old. My parents weren't fans, so they weren't talking about baseball, they weren't watching it on TV, we weren't going to games, they weren't listening to it on the radio, just I didn't know it existed. Until friends of mine who were baseball fans was like, oh, oh, this is a thing, and fell in love with it, didn't take long. I fell in love with baseball, and fell in love with the Orioles, who at that time they were the best team in baseball, and had players like Brooks Robinson, and Frank Robinson, their manager was Earl Weaver, all Hall of Famers, Jim Palmer was one of their pitchers.

11:2710 years old, my grandparents, take me to my first baseball game at Memorial Stadium, so this was before the current stadium, Camden Yards was built, this was the older stadium, and I can't tell you a 10 years old how excited I was. And I don't remember anything else about that game except for this, as we were in the stadium, our seats were in the upper level, behind home plate, and we were walking along the concourse, finding our section, we found our section we turned and walked into the seating area, and seeing a major league baseball field as green as it was with the players warming up, practicing, seeing that for the first time as I'm walking into the stadium was magical. So many of our memories, I believe, when we think about it, also involve walking. Isn't that great?

12:34Thanks for listening, appreciate you, I'm back tomorrow, in the meantime I hope you have an amazing day, and goos.