Walking is not a consolation prize

Walking gets treated as what you do when you are not doing real exercise. I would put it the other way round: it is the only form of training I have never once abandoned, and that alone makes it worth more than the things I did abandon.

The arithmetic

An hour of brisk walking runs to a few hundred calories for most people, depending on weight and pace. That is less than an hour of running. It is also an hour I will actually spend, on a Wednesday in November, in the rain, after a bad day - and the running is theoretical on all four counts.

Averaged across a month, the form of exercise you do five times a week beats the one you do twice and then stop.

What made it stick

• It needs nothing. No kit, no booking, no changing clothes, no recovery day.
• It attaches to something else. Mine is attached to a phone call I make most evenings, so the decision is already taken.
• There is no failure state. A slow walk still counts. A slow run feels like a failed run, which is how running quietly stopped.

The pace matters more than the distance: brisk enough that a conversation is slightly harder than usual. Beyond that there is not much technique to get wrong, which is most of the point.

None of this is an argument against harder training. It is an argument against skipping the easy thing on the grounds that it is not the hard thing.