The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The Hitlist Ten ways to walk your way to health and happiness from your back door
MONTHS of lockdown, in which the chief entertainment has been to go for a walk, a daunder, an amble, has meant we may be feeling a lack of inspiration. But there’s always a way of rebranding a walk, reorienting it and putting it to a different purpose. A walk is not just a walk. It can be so much more. Walks aren’t just good for your body, they can help you problemsolve, restore your focus and bring you more into harmony with those around. Here are just ten ideas for how to take a life-enhancing stroll from your own back door.
THE WALK AND TALK
There’s no better situation for having a difficult conversation with a friend or family member, or letting off steam about a particular issue, than when you’re walking side by side.
One of the key things about walking together is that we, profoundly social animals that we are, mostly without any conscious thought at all, start to fall into rhythm with each other. Neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, in his blog, has observed: “We evolved as social walkers, making that long-ago journey out of Africa in small family and tribal groups. We are good at moving together and we enjoy it, synchronising our breathing, walking pace and conversation easily and swiftly.”
In 2019, East Lothian GP Pete Churn ran a monthly walking group from his surgery for patients struggling with their mental health. He notes that there’s something powerful about walking and talking: “When you are walking, side by side, people share much more than they would face to face. Everybody knows that the best conversations with kids are in the car, or side by side on a walk.”
Current restrictions allow us to go out for a walk with one other person outside our household, and as many as we like from within our own home.
THE CAKE WALK
Destination: favourite café. Support a local business that is offering takeaway by making a nice sugary bun or traybake the focus of your walk, or pick up a flat white to keep you company on your stroll. You can burn off those extra calories by picking up a brisk stride.
THE PHOTO WALK
Edinburgh photographer Anna Deacon has been recommending regular photo walks in nature through her @thethewildfix Instagram account. For her, the joy through lockdown has been in capturing “the small things” – the intricate patterns of bark, birds flying in the pink morning sky. She encourages people to go out with their phone or camera: “Look up, look down, stop, go slowly, watch the light play on the water, see how the sun haloes around a tree. Take your time and savour this: think of it as a way to calm and soothe your soul. Biophilia is the term for the innate human tendency to interact and connect with nature. It is known to induce calm and good feelings, and we all need more of those right now.”
THE PROBLEM-SOLVING WALK
Walking has been found to make us more creative and to enable breakthroughs in problem-solving. The neuroscientist and walking advocate Shane O’Mara has advised that, if we have some problem to solve, we should write down in bullet points what it is we are seeking to answer or resolve, then just go out for a walk. “Prime yourself by writing down a few questions about what you have to do. Head off for a 15- or 20-minute stroll, and bring a voice recorder or a notebook. You’ll find you generate perhaps twice as many ideas compared to sitting at your desk.”
There is, O’Mara notes, an increasing body of research showing how profoundly walking helps our creativity. “A very simple way of demonstrating that,” he says, “is to do an experiment based around a common household object like a pen and I ask you to come up with as much uses for that as you can in the next three minutes. What you find is that if you get people to do a short period of movement, walk for five or ten minutes prior to generating these new creative ideas, they generate on average twice as many after having walked compared to those who are seated.”
THE NATURE-SPOTTER
Go out looking for the wildlife you already know or, better still, use your walk as a way of learning more by taking along a guidebook or phone app to help you identify new plants or animals. Record sightings of birds you have seen using the British Trust for Ornithology app, Birdtrack. Name that unfamiliar plant using PlantNet, a citizen scientist project on plant biodiversity, which allows you to identify plants by photographing them using your smartphone. Recognise a bird by its song, using the Warblr app. Set your alarm and get up in time for a dawn chorus stroll!
THE ARCHITECTURAL DAUNDER
This pandemic is an opportunity to learn more about your local architecture – even approach it in the way you would, as a tourist, the buildings of a foreign city. Get hold of an architectural guide to your area, if available, or look it up online. Now out of print, Freight Books published an
excellent series for Edinburgh and Glasgow called Look Up. Its title is a reminder that a good architecture book is about looking up, at the rooftops. But it’s also about looking, or going, down that obscure alley you have never tried before.
THE FLÂNERIE
We have the French poet Charles Baudelaire to thank for the ongoing cult of the flaneur, or city wanderer – the idler and loafer, who loiters or strolls the streets. Baudelaire described such a person as “the passionate spectator”. On one level flânerie is the opposite of “stay at home”, yet on another it is the perfect activity for the lockdown because it’s about watching and observing rather than getting involved.
Erika Owen, the author of The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Life, has her own definition of flaneuring, describing it as “experiencing your environment without interacting with it”. We may not be allowed to meet people but we can certainly walk like a flaneur, passing (while keeping at a respectable social distance) the activities of our local streets and maybe pausing for the odd short exchange of hellos.
Some streets feel like they were created for this – my local Leith Walk, for instance, is like flaneur heaven.
THE STEP COUNT
Count those steps, though they don’t have to necessarily be the go-to 10,000 steps a day so often talked about. It turns out that these were just an arbitrary number and we’re only just beginning to get closer to the perfect minimum step goal for human health, though for most of us the answer is more than we’re already doing. Research published in JAMA Internal Medicine has shown that, on average, around 4,400 steps a day is enough to significantly lower the risk of death in older women, compared with those walking about 2,700 steps a day.
But the more steps people walked, the lower their risk of dying early was, before levelling off at around 7,500 steps a day. For many people having a pedometer, smartwatch or even just using their phone is a great motivator to just walk that little bit further each day to try to get to a goal distance.
THE LITTER-PICKER WALK
Last spring, during lockdown, Ramblers Scotland president Lucy Wallace noted in her blog that, since she had started walking in her village, she had noticed the rubbish that was all over the place.
“I’ve started taking a bag and gloves with me when I head out on my walks,” she wrote. “If I see something glinting at me from the undergrowth while I’m out, I put my gloves on and pop it in my bag.
“Most of what I find is shredded plastic or drinks bottles, but I do find some odd stuff, especially on the beach. Today I found a tiny toy soldier, hiding amongst the rocks on the shore.”
It was the Swedes who, in 2016, originally started a trend called plogging, merging the Swedish verbs plocka upp (pick up) and jogga (jog) to create the verb plogga. Now we have not just plogging but also plwalking, in which an ordinary walk is transformed into a litter pick.
Of course, this is easiest done with a litter-picker stick but, if you want to make your stroll into more of a full body workout, ditch the stick, put on the Marigolds and do the bend to pick up. You are now involved in a bending, squatting and stretching routine.
THE SOUNDWALK
A soundwalk is a form of walking audio tour, in which you wander a particular route, accompanied by an atmospheric or storytelling soundtrack. One of the biggest hosts of these is the app Echoes Soundwalk, which offers walks in Edinburgh, but few in other parts of Scotland.
Glasgow Women’s Library has downloadable Women’s Heritage Walk audio tours. And, of course, in the absence of a soundwalk for your area, you can always create your own and share.