On walking

9/13/2020

I've written about walking before.

Here I wrote about walking in the rain and during storms, something I've been considering lately too because recently realized one of the variables that absolutely wrecks my workout schedule/walks is rain and storm. All my plans go out of the window after a couple of days of rain.

Here I wrote about the pleasure of morning walks, and what a wonderful thing it is to be able to leave your house, go to someone's place or meet someone or even have a 'destination' in mind, some talks later get back home and get ready for work. The sense of accomplishment you get from all the socializing, completing a task etcetera even before the day has begun is very rewarding.

And here I talk about my 2-hour walk from our place in Medford to JD's place in Brokline. It's not a fully-fleshed piece yet as I write this, but it's on my to-do list.

I've been thinking about this lately, and a good walk is one of the easiest yet most rewarding workout you can do. You don't need any special equipment, you can control the pace quite easily without needing a 'cooldown period', and you learn so much about your surroundings! Also, there's no pressure on your knees and what not, there's nothing wrong with a long walk!

Walking in cities is a little boring because there's too many streetlights to cross, the traffic doesn't let you go in your reverie, you're chained to the physical world the worrying stressful existence of aggressive drivers and loud horns and all the construction sounds. Still, in the mornings it's better as the noisemakers aren't even up yet.

I've come up with two walking paths for my morning/evening walks, going to work on a few more as the days go by. The first one is quite short, barely an hour, I go from my house to Powderhouse, walk broadway up to Maghoun square, and then walk down Medford St to our place. The route could be lengthened by 40 minutes if I walked up the winter hill and walked down main st. Haven't taken the longer walk myself, but the route is not too disruptive, and a good way to get to know the community.

The other walk, a slightly more scenic one, and longer, starts from our place, takes the bikepath to near assembly, cross the bridge to the other side, walk through the park, come out across from Aldi, and walk by the park to the other bridge, and cross it to get to our place. It involves a lot more greenery and fewer cars to deal with.

The plan is to keep time of hour many minutes it takes me to do either trail, and improve my timing as the days go by.

My other plan, dream, destiny etcetera is to go on a long walk, like a really long walk, maybe even daylong go to a faraway place, just on foot no driving to a pretty hiking spot no searching for the perfect weather in the perfect location. Just walk to an interesting place, and back. Our parents and grandparents didn't have all the transportation options we do now, they walked for hours and days to the nearby towns and cities. Why can we not do that anymore. It's great for the health, a nice distraction away from the screens, and is a cheap hobby anyone can do.

The coolest part of it all is you can be listening to podcasts, making plans in your head, writing things down in between all the while doing this. And even have conversations with people!

That's my other plan for walks...have every walk be 'dedicated' to a couple of people, and make it 'productive' by getting the conversations out of the way. So workout time AND socializing time can be spent walking which means I can walk for longer distances and do it more often. For the friends and family!

11/08/2020

Perhaps as a way to deal with the stresses of the election, perhaps as a replacement for the various hobbies I've been taking slow now, perhaps as a replacement to taking public transport and biking, whatever the combination of issues might be, I've been walking a lot lately. Here I wrote about how I've been walking like crazy lately. Should have posted here, or pasted it here, but I want to increase that post count but also don't need to mess up the word-per-post metric. Here is the link.