Why I Started Walking Instead of Running

I used to run. Not well, not fast, and — I can admit this now — not happily. I ran because running was what exercise looked like in my imagination: effortful, a little punishing, legitimately athletic. Walking was what you did to get somewhere, not something you could count.

This was wrong, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that it was wrong.

The shift happened after a minor knee issue that made running uncomfortable for about six weeks. I started walking instead — long walks, forty minutes to an hour, at no particular pace. And something strange happened: I felt better. Not just in my knees. In the diffuse, hard-to-locate way that you feel better when you have been getting outside and moving your body and not treating the whole enterprise as a transaction that needs to be over as quickly as possible.

Walking, it turns out, is extraordinary exercise. The science is not subtle about this. Regular walking reduces cardiovascular risk, improves mood, supports sleep, and manages weight with a reliability that running, for most people, cannot match — because most people can actually sustain walking. Running is an exercise that many people start and many people stop. Walking is one you can do at seventy-five in the rain without particularly heroic commitment.

What I have gained, beyond the knees: about forty minutes a day in which I am moving through the world without a destination that needs to be reached urgently. I think about things. I notice things. I return home having solved at least one problem I did not realize I was working on. It became, in a way, the analog to going quiet online — the same clearing of mental space, just accomplished through movement rather than subtraction.

The benefits compounded with other small changes I was making. Better sleep was part of it — I wrote separately about what happened when I stopped setting an alarm for six weeks, and the walk-to-sleep connection turned out to be real.

It counts. I promise it counts.