Tag: exercise

Walking is good for thinking

exercise

I try to go for a walk every day. I have kept my streak going for a while. Sadly, my Apple Watch, which tracks similar exercise-related things, does not tell me how many days in a row I’ve gone for a walk. I could probably dig that information out of the app’s colorful, well-designed graphical user interface, but I just know that I’ve been doing it for a while with very few breaks. The breaks are when I’m sick; not much else deters me.

The health benefits are good; I know that a couple of years ago when I would go for a walk I would quickly get out of breath and that doesn’t happen any more. My heart rate rarely gets out of Zone 1 unless I try to do a little jog.

I have mentally mapped out routes through my neighborhood, keeping to side streets as much as possible. The routes include laps around a park nearby so I can walk on soft grass if I want (or stop at a public restroom or get some water if I need to). I can tailor the routes to be anywhere from 25 minutes long to over an hour. It’s great.

One of the major benefits, though, is the mental break. Especially for the past 7 months, I’ve spent all my time at home, rarely leaving, because I was unemployed. Going outside gives me a new viewpoint, literally, and the habitual movement allows my mind to wander.

Wandering minds are creative minds. Walking, it turns out, is good for thinking.

On today’s walk, as on nearly every other walk, I had headphones in and listened to podcasts. Today’s was this week’s episode of Accidental Tech Podcast, where three friends talk about various tech news and developments, mostly focused on Apple and the ecosystem surrounding Apple products. They do wander into other topics, though, and a frequent one is cars and car news, since the podcast they started first was called Neutral and was entirely about cars.

Casey, in the aftershow of this week’s episode, told a truely astonishing story about a car failure that I do not want to spoil. If you have any interest in cars, as I do, you owe it to yourself to listen and marvel at Casey and his wife’s terrible luck. Everyone is fine, except for their car, an otherwise-bulletproof 2017 Volvo.

Listening to that, though, reminded me of many past car-related stories, and since I’m trying to post something here daily, I realized that I could mine those stories for future posts. It would make a nice break from all the D&D I’ve been posting here lately. Gotta keep up with my theme, which is that I write about whatever the fuck I want and don’t have to stick to any single topic because this is my place on the internet.

I was able to remind myself of that topic by asking Siri on my Watch to remind me about it when I got home. This feature is amazing for me: the act of making the reminder helps me remember, and then getting another reminder when I get close to home helps seal it in my short-term memory, which is otherwise like a fine Swiss cheese.

Look forward to posts about that, and other topics, in the days to come, but for now, I’m thankful I can still move around, and that my body and my mind work together to keep me living a creative life.

A walk in the neighborhood

Daily Story Project

I try to walk daily. At least one walk of 20+ minutes, every day. My overall exercise goal is 45 minutes daily, though, so I typically go for longer walks to try to get it all done in one go. If I don’t, I can usually make up the rest of the exercise goal by another shorter walk, or general housekeeping (laundry, cleaning, going up and down the stairs, etc.)

Lately I’ve been sick; coughing and nasal congestion, ugh. Not fun. This is the second time this year I’ve had a respiratory illness and I didn’t usually get these that often before the pandemic started. I did test for Covid when this first hit but it came back negative, so my streak of “never tested positive for Covid” continues. But, yeah, this is probably Covid or one of the other stupidly-ridiculously-contagious respiratory infections that are going around, happy happy joy joy.

That being said I did go for a walk this afternoon. Because of the way my brain works, I have worked out several loops of varying length. I have developed these over time and they all meet certain criteria: the paths, when mapped, can’t cross over themselves at any point, and can’t repeat any section. I don’t know why, y’all, that’s just how it works, and by that I mean both the pattern and my brain. I do have some parts that carve out circles inside of larger circles but they don’t cross, I swear. The paths get kinda weird but it’s one big shape.

Side note: what’s the topological or geometrical word for that kind of shape? I can’t recall and it’s kinda distracting. But I’m writing this as one big long typing session so I don’t want to break off to do a search for it. Maybe it’ll come to me by the end.

I try to alternate whether I do the loops clockwise or counter-clockwise but I think my walk tonight started in the same direction as the one yesterday; into the neighborhood, away from the major street. I had my earbuds in, listening to a podcast, as I do. I had my walking shoes on (Brooks Adrenaline GTS) and walking shorts. I did take my phone, which I normally don’t do; usually just my watch and driver’s license.

The long straight section this loop starts with is on a secondary road, mostly residential but there’s one building I suspect is an office building, or maybe it’s housing for elderly folks or folks in treatment? There are often those minibus kind of buses in the parking lot. Almost every time I walk past, I think, I should look this up on Google Maps to find out what it is. Next interesting building is a fire station, and today the firefighters (all men as far as I could tell) were out washing the engine, which felt wholesome. They waved and I waved back.

I passed an Asian temple of some kind, private, gated, a non-descript modern building. A bit later, turn down a side street, a couple of turns on an unimproved road, and past a park. Tonight I wasn’t going past the park; I turned to cut the loop short. Ten minutes later I’m on another unimproved road (that’s how you can tell I live in SouthEast Portland; we don’t get pavement nor sidewalks) and then past the fenced in yard filled with chickens, a couple dozen of them.

The chickens pay me no attention.

Another long walk on the road (no sidewalks here either), avoiding the ocassional car going past, listening to the guys on the podcast talk about tech and cars. When I get back to the main street, I realize that I need some extra time to make sure I can close my rings, so I add a long in-and-out stretch into a residential area. The sidewalks are also occupied by a group of neighborhood kids on bikes and scooters and they don’t seem to know how to avoid me, so I have to actively avoid them. I don’t mind at all, they’re not being hostile, just energetic and innocent.

Done with that section, I go back to the main road. I pause the podcast because it, plus the noise of traffic, are too loud for my stuffed ears. And soon I’m back home again.