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Category: walking

Perpetual Motion

Perpetual Motion

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A walk yesterday to Long Bridge Park, which is a bit of a misnomer since there’s not really a bridge and barely a park. But who’s counting when it’s 70 degrees on February 7?

What Long Bridge is, though, is window on the perpetual motion of a busy American city.

The walk adjoins the train tracks, and yesterday, in just 10 minutes, I saw a freight train, Amtrak and the Virginia Railway Express commuter express all chugging along.

East of the train tracks is the George Washington Parkway, where I would later spend close to an hour inching my way home. But at 1 p.m. the traffic is moving, and the cars are like flies skimming the surface of a pond where stately swans (the trains) hold the eye.

Finally, there are the planes taking off and landing at National Airport, just across the way. The low jets fill the sky as they roar heavenward.

It’s an invigorating stroll. I’m moving, the trains, planes and cars are moving. I try to catch all three in my gaze at the same time, to savor their motion and amplify my own.

Mappiness

Mappiness

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In a few minutes I’ll bundle up and take to the streets. It will be my lunch break and I’ll spend it walking in the suburbs. No surprise there. But what is news, at least to me, is how much scientific evidence there is to back up my hobby/exercise/obsession.

In 2010, a British environmental economist named George MacKerron created an app called Mappiness that allowed him to check in with 20,000 volunteers several times a day and ask them what they were doing and how they felt about it.  The data he collected showed that people are significantly happier when they’re outdoors — even when other variables are accounted for.

Great news, right? Unfortunately, he also found that people are indoors or in vehicles 93 percent of the time. So even though we’re happiest outside, we spend most of our time inside.

What to do? Another researcher, Timothy Beatley of the Biophilic Cities Project at the University of Virginia (which I’ve just been reading about and will definitely discuss some day in a separate blog post), says we need daily doses of nature: everything from New York City’s High Line to the little park around the corner. We can’t let the perfect (a hike in Yosemite) be the enemy of the good (a walk around the block).

It’s always tough to parse the value of the walks I take, to figure out how much of their benefit comes from moving through space and how much from the space I’m moving through. All I know is that the woods and trails around my home and the parks I frequent in the city are far more than backdrops; they are mood-enhancing and soul-stirring. They are the stars of the show.


(Thanks to Ellen for sending me the Wall Street Journal article where I learned about this research.)

Keep Climbing

Keep Climbing

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What I continue to think of as my new job (though I’ve been here for nine months) has put me in touch with a fine set of stairs, so when I have a few minutes I trudge from the fifth to the 11th floor and back down again.

It amazes me that no matter how often I do this it still winds me. I think sometimes about what’s going on in my body, how the muscles are moving, using oxygen, how my breath comes faster the higher I climb, trying to stoke the furnace, that marvelous furnace that fuels us all.

Yes, mine are old (older!) bones and muscles, but I expect them to keep up. I want at least a couple more decades of walking in the suburbs.

So to forget about the pain, I ponder as I clamber.  How can I make this easier? How can I stay in shape? Only one answer: Keep climbing.

(These are not the stairs I climb, but they are very special stairs.)

Armchair Amble

Armchair Amble

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A quiet morning here, made possible by cloudy skies and sleepy parakeets. (It helps that I haven’t uncovered their cage yet, poor things.)

A cold has kept me inside for days, and I’m feeling the psychic effects of it. Time for an armchair amble.

I walk out the door, slip between the houses across the street and find a familiar path. It’s almost overgrown now but I pick my way along until I come to the road. There I find the familiar landmarks: the horses and the stream, the big house on the hill, the pasture that (if viewed from the right angle) almost seems rural.

Air fills my lungs and my stride lengthens. I’m in the groove now, moving quickly in the chill. How good it feels to be alive and in the world. When I’m in it I often don’t appreciate it. But now that I’m not … well, it’s good to have a reminder.

Airing Out

Airing Out

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There are days in D.C. that bring a bright sun and mild feel to our winter, that air it out like an open window on a chilly night.

Yesterday was such a day, when a 30-minute walk took on grand proportions in the landscape of the hours, and made my afternoon significantly peppier than my morning.

There were bicyclists on the path and runners shedding layers. There were the familiar take-offs and landings at National Airport. There was the monument ahead of me and all the promise of a new year.

I was on a path, moving forward.

Walking in Silence

Walking in Silence

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I’m thinking back to last week’s trip to colonial America. In eighteenth-century Williamsburg, most people walked. They walked to the fields to work, they walked to the Capitol to debate the Stamp Act. They walked to the tavern and the milliner and the tinsmith.

Yes, they had wagons and carriages, and sometimes they rode in them. But mostly, they walked.

I think about the walking and the silence, the combination of the two. Then I think about my own noisy, clattery world.

Yes, I enjoy antibiotics and flush toilets and central heating. But oh what I would give for the walking and the silence, for the time it would give to collect thoughts and mull over the future.

Mid-Pause

Mid-Pause

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Here I’m enjoying the Great Pause, which in part has meant a blog pause, though not for long because, well, writing here is what I do.

I love the disorientation this time of year brings. Is it Monday? Tuesday? Should I start watching a movie at 10 p.m.? Why not?

The trick is to balance the vegging with small, discrete tasks. Tidy up the area under the bathroom sink. Look through one of the boxes from Lexington, Mom’s things, an activity that must be reserved for moments of lightness and strength. (Come to think of it, that may have to wait.)

Most of all, time for reading, writing, talking and walking. Four of my favorite things.

Pentagon Mornings

Pentagon Mornings

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Some wear fatigues, others dress uniforms, and I could say good morning to many of them by name, since they wear their names on their sleeves — or close to them.

If I keep at my new walking route long enough I’ll know some of these Pentagon workers by heart.  The hordes who pour out of my standing-room-only bus, the others who stroll in from satellite parking lots and from the apartments off Army-Navy Drive.

Almost all of them are walking to the Pentagon — while I’m walking away from it.

The reason, of course, is simple. I work a mile or more away from the place. I just jump off the bus early to stretch my legs.

But I have to confess that it gives me a thrill to walk against this particular traffic.

My mornings at the Pentagon … are brief.

Roses in December

Roses in December

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I remember the moment but little about its context, so for that reason it has the contours of a dream. I was walking along Hart Road in Lexington, and I came across a walled backyard. “Miranda,” the plaque read. “Roses in December.”

Were there roses? I don’t remember. But I do recall the gray stones of the solid wall and the magic of the place, as if snow wouldn’t stick there, as if I could walk from the cold, gray winter of my life into some warm, enchanted place — just by strolling through the wrought iron gate.

I thought of Miranda today when I passed a still-blooming knockout rose on my walk to the office. It brought me back to “Roses  in December” and that long-ago amble. It was, I realize now, one of the first times I realized the fantasies I could spin while moving through space. Now I have a much better idea.

The Regular

The Regular

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It was the wave that did it. A simple, familiar wave from a man I’ve watched for years, an “older man” (older than me!), who mows his lawn in a circle around a central clump of bushes.

I’ve noticed this man and his wife for years, shoveling snow, planting annuals, vacuuming up leaves (this weekend’s project). He is, for lack of a better term, a regular. One of the folks I see on my walks through Folkstone, one of the ones who (because I’ve never gotten to know him) is known more by the color of his shutters (green) and the method of his leaf removal (tractor) than anything else.

But it was the way he waved to me — familiar, off-handed — that made me realize that, just as I see him as a regular, so he sees me.

I’m the woman in the worn white running jacket, a little worse for the wear, slowing down as the years pass — still at it, though. I’m “the woman who walks” (sometimes runs). A fixture of sorts.

In other words, I’m a regular, too.