A reader asks whether a ten minute walk is even worth counting

A reader wrote in to say she has ten minutes on most days and an hour on almost none, and she wants to know whether the ten minutes is even worth lacing up for, or whether she should wait until she has the time to do it properly.

I want to answer the question she asked and then the question underneath it.

The one she asked is easy. Yes, the ten minutes counts. It counts because the thing you are actually training on a busy day is not your legs, it is the act of starting while busy. That is the skill that falls apart first and matters most. Anyone can train when they have an open afternoon and good weather and nothing on their mind. Almost nobody has that, almost ever. So the ten minute walk on the ordinary Tuesday is not a smaller version of the real thing. On most days it is the real thing.

The question underneath is the one I hear in the word properly. Properly is doing a great deal of quiet damage in that sentence. It suggests there is a correct size for the effort and that anything below it is a kind of cheating, a down payment that never clears. I would gently throw properly out of the house.

Here is what I notice, and I will only tell you what I can see rather than what I am told to say. The people who keep moving over years are almost never the ones who found the perfect plan. They are the ones who kept the floor low. They had a version of the thing so small it survived a bad week, a late night, a head cold on the mend, a child who would not settle. When everything else got cancelled, the ten minute walk did not, because it was too small to be worth cancelling. That is its entire genius. It is beneath the notice of the part of you that looks for reasons to stop.

I am wary of any promise that cannot show its working, so I will not tell you what a short walk will do for your body. I do not know your body and neither does anyone selling you a number. What I will tell you is what the short walk does for the habit, because that I have watched happen again and again. It keeps the line unbroken. And an unbroken line is worth more than any single heroic session, because the heroic session, done once and then abandoned for a fortnight, teaches you nothing except that you cannot be trusted. The small walk teaches you the opposite, every single day, in the only language that sticks, which is evidence.

So do not wait for the hour. The hour is a lovely thing when it comes and you should take it gladly. But do not let it become the gatekeeper for the ten minutes, because the hour arrives rarely and the ten minutes arrives all the time, and the whole business is decided by what you do all the time.

Lace up. Go to the corner and back if that is all there is. Come home. Do not grade it. Tomorrow, when you are busy again, you will already know you are the kind of person who went yesterday. That belief is the actual equipment. Everything else is just shoes.

The ten-minute version is where A Walk, Then Another begins: make a beginning that fits, find a pace you can live with, and return without turning a missed day into a verdict.