"I'm going for an 8.93 mile walk honey"

That is what I told my wife on the evening of May 21st last year 2007.

Three weeks back from a great 17-day vacation to Italy where we stayed in Rome the entire time, I realized that I was back to business-as-usual and not walking as much as I like and should. And definitely not as much as we did in Rome. While I did not keep track, it felt like we averaged over 10 miles of daily walking while in Rome. We “roamed Rome” and it felt good to be in motion constantly as we incessantly covered one part of the eternal city to the other.

So I decided to walk to work on Tuesday, May 22, 2007. I used an internet website to calculate the distance of my planned journey – it was an 8.93 mile route.

I woke up early Tuesday, packed a light backpack of change clothes and a lunch and left home at 5:50 a.m. excited about my walk to work. The early morning weather was nice, the air clean and my middle-age man knees actually had some spring in them. My goal was to walk as fast as I could to see how fast I could get to work. I arrived at my office at 8:23 a.m. so my time for this 8.93 mile journey was 2:33.08, a 17:08 mile pace.

But my walking was not done that morning as I had to walk another quarter mile to my gym to take a shower, and then walk back to my office to begin my work day. Not surprisingly, I decided to take the bus home that day.

I repeated this walk-to-work experience for the following three Tuesdays, each time completing the distance a little faster than the previous week as follows:

Tuesday, May 29th – completed in 2:21.33 or a 15:52 mile pace

Tuesday, June 5th - completed in 2:18.39 or a 15:32 mile pace

Tuesday, June 12th – completed in 2:17.46 or a 15:26 mile pace

Then the weather started to get warmer and I had client work assignments requiring me to use my car. One thing let to another and I never walked to work again. But this experiment did cultivate a hometown walking mindset and I try to engage in functional walking as much as I can. I generally walk to downtown client work locations as I live close to downtown. And I generally walk to Sunday Mass at the Cathedral, a 2-mile round trip.

I am going to walk more during this new September month. How far I don’t know but I’ll try to walk daily and record my walking effort. It would be nice to walk at least 100 miles for the month. Stay tuned and we will see.

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum