Christian Ross

I walked to work.

I was skimming a magazine while at the house at lunch today. One of the things I read was about an entrepreneur who was giving three recommendations of things he likes and/or uses regularly. The list was boring and of little use to me other than a nugget that I pulled out about his tennis shoes and their encouragement for him to stay active when most of his day is spent in a sedentary situation: desk, emails, chairs, phones, keyboards, etc. He mentioned having a good pair of tennis shoes was nice for when he walked the 30 minutes back and forth to work each day.

It didn’t really trigger any type of epiphany inside of me but it did provoke me to at least think, ‘why don’t I walk to work?’ in my own acorn-brain. Nobody was home at the time to talk me out of it so I decided to set forth. Here’s a few things related to my walk or thoughts that crossed through my head as I jaunted south from my house to my office about 12:45pm on 4/9/13:

• In an initial trial walk, it takes this (quite under-exercised) individual 27:13 to go from my house front door to my office back door.
• Google breaks down the distance of my path traveled at 1.6 miles which is obviously off since that’s about a snails pace of 3.3MPH.
• I found a dime about the 16 minute mark.
• It’s quite windy outside today. Sustained winds of 15-25MPH and gusts up to 30MPH. The temperature is really nice outside though It’s supposed to cool off again tomorrow.
• There was a pretty significant wreck at the intersection I would have driven through getting back to the office. I’m not alluding to anything other to say that I noticed it and guesstimate that it probably occurred around the time I would have been traveling through. I hope that everyone involved is okay.
• I’m still on the fence about walking home.
• My left knee started hurting before and a little more than my right knee. I didn’t look at the time when it started to hurt but it was probably about the mark of the first third of the journey.
• I’ve been thinking about getting a bike. I contemplated that some more along my walk. I don’t need anything crazy or super-charged but I’ll probably end up spending more than I need to.
• There’s a few of properties between my house and here that I’d be interested in owning. None of them are for sale right now. The houses are older than ours but each has a bit more character and a little more land around them.

I don’t really have much of a commute so it was nice to have a bit of a change of pace. All in all, I think it was a good decision. To finish, a couple of things I’m grateful for post adventure…

I’m thankful for the physical abilities I still have to be able to walk to work. I’m thankful for the work that we have so that I can continue to traverse such odd spur of the moment desires. I’m thankful that we have the ability to live and work in the same community and that I don’t have long, daily (traffic-stuffed) commutes.