Good enough post partum fitness

My doctor asks me all the usual questions at the 6-week check up. How do I sleep? What is my energy like? Do I get out? Do I exercise? 

I reply I go for walks.

And then he asks what is the furthest distance I have walked so far and I try to recall the few times I have been for a walk. So I attempt to calculate the distance from one letter box to the next and the next.

There is a total of three letterboxes on our rural road. Last time I walked past the second letter box I did not make the third. To give the doctor the right sort of an answer, I come up with an estimate distance of 800 m but I am sure it's more. This is the furthest I have walked between all three letterboxes since  six weeks ago when the little ones arrived

He asks how many meters I usual walk even before the birth and I am pushed to think even harder for an answer. Letterboxes aside, they say a pregnant woman's brain shrinks and as far as I can remember before the anaesthetic wore off from my c-section, I recall only that I swim a lot and didn't really go for walks during my pregnancy which mixes up my brain up even more.

My doctor asks questions with military precision and speed and while I am trying to keep up with the questions he is asking simutaneously I am trying to give him true answers without falling into the trap of breaking into any one persona of the dozens of John Cleese's roles I have watched before and after pregnancy.

I am thinking how am I going to tie in the current walking distances with the swimming distances to derive at the pre-pregnancy fitness level the doctor is asking after? Did I do any walking other than to my car, to work, through the supermarket?

So I answer that I rowed at Corporate8 races last year and won. And he replies with military precision and speed, "good enough".

I next asks whether my wound had healed enough at 7 weeks to return to swimming.

He remonstrats then answeres that after a caesarean  it is a good idea to start by growing fitness levels by introducing slow short walks to longer more rigorous ones, then swimming, then biking, then ...

Today I walk to the corner, past letterbox one and two, pushing a double buggy uphill and make it just beyond letterbox three. I feel out of breath and a wee bit disappointed I have not made it a little further but I think "good enough" remembering my doctor appointment with fondness and catching my breath