Fit in my 40s: anyone for a walk-meeting?

I cannot pretend to have rigidly followed the WalkActive techniques I wrote about in January (you remember: foot like Velcro, lift from your hips, hold your neck as if you have diamond drop earrings that you unaccountably want the world to see) but I will – thanks to a combination of my Fitbit and the fact that I don’t really want to run – now readily walk from one place to another. Dr Andrew Murray, sports medicine consultant at Edinburgh university, spends his life measuring the health benefits of walking, and says that if you go from being a couch potato to a regular walker, you can put seven years on your life. You’re more likely to see the big picture and less likely to get bogged down in details.

I always walked the dog; I sometimes walked over the river for the romance; but the most efficient way to walk a lot is to merge it with some other task, which is how the walk-meeting was invented. I’ve had one walk-meeting before, but only about sustainability. It’s hard to walk next to a hippy: if you go too slow, they think you’d rather be sitting down; if you go too fast, you’re in league with The Man.

I am very whiny and hairless – I could write a column just on the sparsity of my eyebrows – so I feel the cold like a whippet and that is usually all I talk about. Then I got sent a Blaze Wear jacket, an absurd spendy item (£250) with a battery pack that heats your side-ribs to cooking temperature, so for a long time all I could talk about was how weird it was to have your face in February and your trunk in the Bahamas.


Source: theguardian