walking

[dragonlady7]

It's weird how funny people are about me walking to work. Like... it's... under two miles. It's not even quite a mile and a half. I fully acknowledge that walking in yesterday's ice storm was dangerous-- I almost fell several times, and pulled a muscle and aggravated whatever my mysterious hip condition is-- and so I drove today, because my muscles are sore from my core to my shins-- but like!
There are so many people in the world who don't have a choice?? Who have to walk as part of their commute?
And I'm not sure if my coworkers and friends and family's astonishment at my commute habits are because of the thing itself, or because I have a choice and am choosing to do it anyway. I'm really not sure.

I let my car warm up in the driveway for a ridiculous fifteen minutes this morning, because it was completely crusted with ice and also the inside of the windshield has moisture built up and every time I run it I have to scrape it and wipe it and try to get it clean, and then the car is only on for five minutes and it solidifies again. So I figured letting it go for 15 minutes would help, and I was right. But I need to run some errands or something. This won't be a problem once I'm going to the farm again, but when my car sits idle except for a couple of 5-minute drives once or twice a week, it's kind of bad for the car.

(I haven't gotten gas since November, which is the last time I drove my car to the farm.)

But like. It's not a carbon emissions thing, for me-- I mean, why not, but-- it's a fitness thing! If I don't walk to work, my job natively contains so little physical exercise that my watch barely registers 2000 steps a day. I don't gain weight or whatever (it's been many years since I thought about exercise like that but it's still worth pointing out), but I develop joint problems and don't feel good, and then it's even more of a struggle when I go back out to the farm and can't fucking make it up a hill or whatever.

If I paid money to join a gym and drove there three times a week to run on a treadmill for however much would add up to the miles I walk to work and back, nobody would think that was weird or notable in any way. A few people would applaud my willpower if I did it consistently.

Anyway! I'm thinking about this too much because I'm cold and grouchy and my leg muscles are all sore, as I expected, from the Groucho Marx Slink-A-Thon yesterday. (Though I suspect the real damage was from having to go totally tense to sideways-surf down unexpectedly frictionless inclines. My sense of balance is pretty good but that was fucking intense.)

(I wouldn't have driven today, I would have walked off the stiffness, except that it is equally icy today, and I thought you know, if I fall and injure myself because I tried this walk when my muscles were already tired, I will feel like even more of an idiot than I would have if I'd fallen and hurt myself yesterday.)


And I'm just thinking about all the low-income carless sorts who have to walk to work every single day and probably don't own good snowboots and they're all out there today and nobody's gonna tell them they're so brave and if they fall they probably don't have insurance or sick days and now I'm super depressed. How is this our society??

Comments

[toujours_nigel]

I'm mostly horrified by the weather, but that's in a tropics way not in an anti-walking way.

[buttonsbeadslace]

Walking as transportation is such a big Cultural Differences thing. And it has some basis in practical reasons-- like lack of sidewalks, highways with no good places to cross them-- but a lot of it is just. Cultural. IDK.

[redstapler]

We're moving offices in the spring, and the new space is just about 2mi away. Google Maps estimates about 40-45min for the walk.

I might try walking or biking it before it gets too hot.

[dragonlady7]

It's so great. becuase it's time-consuming but like. if you just do it in the time you were accustomed to spending on your commute, then you've already got that time set aside.
in my case-- it's flat, there are sidewalks, there is a light the one place i really need to cross a busy street. if only people would shovel.

you have crazy heat to deal with, which i never do. crazy cold you can bundle up for, but heat you can't really avoid. people thought id' stop walking when it was cold but if i get used to having to spend 5 minutes commuting instead of 25, then i'll never walk again, i'll always be running late and give into the temptation to just drive.

but it's really nice to have walked, even if the walk itself gets boring.

[harpers_child]

People who usually drive don't understand people who walk. When I lived uptown I had a 10 block walk to and from work every day. (Sometimes longer. It was 5 blocks from my apartment to the streetcar stop and 5 blocks from the stop nearest work to the shop. If the streetcar was running late sometimes I just walked it.)

Get your movement in however works for you.

[sabotabby]

I find this so weird.

My work is a little over a mile away and I wouldn't think of not walking there. Two miles is totally reasonable. I do a minimum of 10,000 steps daily, but I'm trying to average over 12,000 steps—last year, my average was around 12,500.

But a few of my co-workers find it really weird that I walk, even in shitty weather (and it gets really shitty here). I'm like, it takes me as long to walk as it would to transit (this would be the same if it was twice as far away) and I'm not late, which I would be if I took transit and the weather was bad. But there are two people who live only slightly farther away who wouldn't think of walking to work.

Weirdly, it seems like a point of privilege, because I live and work in an urban, walkable neighbourhood. When I was commuting 2 hours a day to the inner suburbs on transit, everyone out there drove because the transit sucked. But housing was more affordable.

[dragonlady7]

Some of us have lived for most of our lives in pedestrian-hostile suburban spaces with zero public transit options and it shows.

Actually! This reminds me that I took the bus for a while, and at my old job it wasn't super notable-- though it was odd to some that *I* did, because I worked a higher-paid position (bartender, so lower base salary, but overwhelmingly better-compensated, and also exclusively white, while the cashiers/maintenance workers were paid only base wages and were more predominantly Black)-- and at my new job despite being directly on a bus line and near a busy stop, everyone was blown away on the few occasions I took a bus out there. "You WHAT!"
Mmmm hmmm both racist and classist assumptions there!

I stopped taking the bus because it was super time-consuming and had an unwieldy transfer and then the city downgraded their public transport even further and there were no buses at remotely the right times, but. I liked it; it was a good time to decompress, and I could sew or read.

Now there'd be no point; I'd have to walk basically the same distance because the bus stops are so poorly-spaced.

[sabotabby]

One or two of my colleagues and I were the only white people on the bus, usually. I keep thinking that all the working poor folks who took transit with me at Horrible O'Clock are really screwed now.

There were things I liked about it, like having time to read and listen to music, but I had some very chatty co-workers and I'd occasionally get up even earlier so that I could avoid running into them on the commute.