Calling all hares - Sometimes it pays to be a tortoise
Monday 15 January 2024
The most intensive workout in the world falls short of true fitness if that's all you do. Perhaps the reason you hear about heart attacks associated with the game of squash is because, often the sport of high-pressured business people, the rest of the time they're riding round in cars or taxis, snatching bagels and phone conversations on the move, subjecting themselves to constant mental anguish, and then pitching their bodies into an intensive, anaerobic shock for an hour or less
Yet there is a simple discipline to improve your overall health and wellbeing. It's the one you were born with, needs no tuition, is entirely free-of-charge, and probably neglected by you. Walking. This is not to do with walking as a sport or a hobby - if you already go hiking with a rucksack on your back, that's fine, it's very good for you. But what this article is about concerns the walking opportunities in your everyday life which you might be ignoring.
Walking is a journey between A. and B. The distance is irrelevant - five minutes to a shop or an hour to an appointment. The question is, that if time (and weather) allows for that journey to be taken on foot, why don't you do it? You don't have to walk fast if you don't want to - a strolling pace is fine. The point is, you do your body such a favour each time you walk. And much overlooked, you benefit your mind so much as well. Any walk, by its very nature, slows everything down to a leisurely pace. Gives you time to think. It is reckoned, by the way, that many philosophers, musicians and physicists, have had their greatest ideas while they were walking. The irony is that in a car or on a bus or train, despite having time on your hands, because your physical activity is zero, your mind tends to take a break - we're more prone to vegetate on such journeys.
Walking, any distance, limbers everything up, gets the circulation going in a comfortable way, improves your breathing and the harmony between breath and movement, and is great for the digestion. In the old days, whole families used to go for a stroll after the evening meal together. They called it a 'constitutional', because they understood how much their constitutions benefited from this simple pleasure.
So, in today's more hectic environment, if you can walk it, do yourself a million favours and walk it. Remember, tortoises live up to a hundred times longer than hares.