"There is an actual neurological basis to what I am talking about...You can make a pretty good evolutionary argument that this was how we were designed to absorb information at about 5km an hour (3mph)"
For me walking is more conducive to careful thinking than any other activity, and taking a walk has frequently proven to be the best way to work on my hardest problems, deepest mysteries, and most stressful situations. Do others walk to think?
Having worked with several startups over the past 16 years, I'll make the observation that I've been in a tiny minority on this count, and I find myself wondering what kind of situational & cultural biases in the startup world work against walking as a way of thinking. Keyboards, cars, commutes, an obsession with faster-is-better, craving novelty, fear of "missing the window." What else?
I occasionally walk a few blocks when I'm mentally stuck on something. Usually that's all it takes. I find that going for a walk minimizes external demands and maximizes the mental resources that can be turned inward. It also provides a nominal purpose that allows my mind to abandon its direction and wander out of whatever cul-de-sac it was stuck in.
When I was in high school and college, though, I used to drive to think. It was partly to do with growing up in Texas (a big, spread-out state with lots of straight, empty highways) and also partly to do with privacy. If I wanted privacy, I would go out on the highway and drive. Living with parents, and later with roommates, a car was the only place where I knew that I wouldn't be bothered. In a small town, walking means making yourself conspicuous, which isn't conducive to contemplation. You have to be in a dense city or a rural area to achieve solitude through walking.
Given that driving used to serve the same purpose for me, I wonder if the physical effects of walking are important. For me, the most important factor was suspending the constant vigilance of being around other people. Always knowing you could be interrupted, knowing you might need to put on a mask at a moment's notice, how can you really think? Walking and driving require a very low level of engagement with the outside world, but some engagement, which intermittently rises and falls as you encounter interesting sights or an occasional challenge such as a puddle to walk around, another car on the road that must be paid attention to, or a choice of going right or left. (Driving in the city usually doesn't work. Safety demands too much attention.) If I were to name the most important factors, I would include solitude, freedom from vigilance, and occasional non-threatening interruptions of one's train of thought.
I saw that same quote, and thought about my walk a few years back, across the breadth of the UK (Wales to London). I do feel like I have a better intuitive grasp of the size of it now -- much better than you get from driving or taking the train.
That's true for me as well. When I was a student, revising (and memorising bits that needed to be memorised) was almost always a form of holding a book and walking in circles. Or around the house.
I now spend as much time walking around the office as I do cranking code or writing on my desk. Over the years, I started recognising other habitual pacers in the department. We joke about forming a society and lobbying for a pacing room.
Sign me up -- though the hardest problems require the space out in the Big Blue Room. Perhaps the new research on how sitting can undermine our health will restore some clout to moving about.
I take an evening stroll of at least one hour every single day, even if it's drizzling (I don't go out if it's raining, I'm not that crazy.) It's my moment for thinking about where I'm at with my life, make a sanity check (working crazy hours on a startup requires frequent sanity checks), ponder what should be my next steps and occasionally, even think about some work-related stuff.
I don't know whether it's the walking, the solitude (not many people walking around where I live and I only have to cross about 5 roads in a 4mi walk), the soft music I walk to, or what, but it works wonders.
As you your point: I'm definitely in a minority here. Unfortunately the other guys have mostly forgotten how to use their legs and complain even when having to walk a couple blocks down the road to fetch food. It's quite sad, actually :/
Sometimes I walk to think, though usually it's more mental mumbling than anything focused. I do think my daily walk is good for my mental health. I feel the difference if I go without one for very long.
If you are a busy/frantic person, walking isn't a very intense way of exercising, and doesn't translate to an achievement game as easily as running, lifting weights, etc. If you don't have a nice area to walk in, I can see not ever really understanding the appeal. I would probably still walk now if I moved to a metro area, but I might not have picked up the habit in the first place.
Yes! I usually run on a closed track on the local gym, but recently I've tried trail-walking through a forest. It's incredibly calming to be amongst trees and away from civilization... and later, when you come back home to a warm dinner, you realize why you want civilization in the first place :) (i.e it makes you aware of things you usually take for granted)
For me the best activity for thinking is running on a closed track. The boredom of running in circles and the need to avoid thinking about how many more circles I have to go and how much my legs are starting to hurt is a really good motivator to get absorbed in your mind and work through stuff.
Driving a car at night comes as a close second, but without the added benefits of exercise.
Long train journeys are also surprisingly effective, as I've recently found out.
Hopefully he'll be more lucky with the russian visa than Karl Bushby [1], who's been hiking in the other direction. Unfortunately most information on his site has been removed.
His route takes him through hundreds of miles of Arctic tundra. As someone who has spent time in the far north:
Walking on tundra is like walking on a head of cabbage that is sitting on a four-inch sponge that is floating in four inches of water. The cabbage heads are all about eight inches apart. When you step on them, they are going to twist in some unknown direction and slide your foot onto the sponge, or into the four inches of water. The really bad tundra, known as bottom, is about eight inches deep and is sitting on top of sucking mud. --http://whiterick.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/dalton-highway-car...
Stepping on a tussock is like stepping on a toothbrush, Toolik scientists like to say. You try to avoid it. So tundra walking is like treading on the jostling shoulders of a million people --http://discovermagazine.com/1996/jun/runningontundra787
hiking on tundra forces you into a gait that is not like walking on pavement (straight up and down)... tundra is more liking walking on a waterbed... you are using lots of the accessory muscles just to keep upright --http://forums.outdoorsdirectory.com/showthread.php/72728-Boo...
For those of you who haven't walked across the tundra it is a giant sponge. When you walk your foot sinks and you have to lift it really high to get the next step, as some put it..walking on tundra is like walking on a giant stair stepper. --http://nicholiepoki03.blogspot.com/2011/09/week-to-remember....
walking on the tundra can be a miserable experience. extremely uneven (kinda like walking on basketballs), wet, and full of holes. make sure you have good waterproof footwear with good ankle support rolling an ankle is very easy on this stuff. --http://forums.outdoorsdirectory.com/showthread.php/115323-Tr...
I was going to disagree with you, because there are obviously walkable roads in Siberia. However, the route as shown on the map goes straight through absolute no man's land. There is no road along the eastern coast. A sensible route would be Yakutsk - Magadan, then take a boat or plane to the US.
I would love to read the story of someone who walked from Siberia to Alaska via the shortest sea crossing possible. But above Magadan, there are no more roads. And the Kolyma highway to Magadan is considered a major adventure already, with only a small window where the rivers are low enough to be crossed by motorcycle (and therefore, man).
I'm not saying this can't be done, but it looks like a serious arctic expedition to me. Which I kind of doubt he will do. This is probably going to end like usual. Helpful Russian truck drivers take him with them for as far as they can go, then (Mommy!!) a helicopter shows up...
I had the privilege of seeing Salopek announce the project at the Knight Civic Media conference, and based on his presentation I can tell you that he is not taking this lightly. This isn't a project that he decided to do on a whim without evaluating the risks. This is a very well-planned, calculated project that desires to not only be fascinating, but also to make a statement on journalism itself. He won't compromise the integrity of it. Of course, there will be people aiding him along the way out of necessity (translators, guides, etc), but I guarantee you there won't be a helicopter or truck involved.
Out of curiosity, I skipped through his talk. He says he will leave Vladivostok on a research vessel and cross the North Pacific that way.
If that is not the proverbial "truck", I don't know what is. I don't blame him, but National Geographic/BBC should really know better than publish such misleading maps.
I've always dreamed of taking a year or more to walk the back-roads of the US and visit all 48 contiguous states on foot. The technical challenge of plotting a route to traverse each state exactly once is appealing in its own right.
I rode a bicycle 14,000 miles around the perimeter of North America in my twenties. It was one of the defining experiences in my life. Everyone was pushing me towards graduate school, but I chose that trip instead. It was the right decision.
That's a funny question. The preparation started when I turned 16, and kept bicycling even after I got a driver's license. I moved to NYC, and started bicycle commuting 5 miles each way from Manhattan to the Bronx. I became very comfortable in traffic.
I teach, so one summer I decided to ride cross-country. I did that two summers in a row; WA-ME one year, and CA-GA the next year.
I had thought of doing the Alaska-Tierra del Fuego trip, but a friend wanted to do another cross country ride. I did that ride, WA to ME again via northern Canada, and then continued on to FL, CA, and AK.
Most of the preparation for each trip was just a bit of extra riding in the months building up. These months-long trips are actually easier to get ready for physically than week-long trips, because you can take the first few weeks easy and use the first part of your trip as training.
I slept outside in a tent. There are places to hide a tent and a bicycle everywhere, and if you're stuck you can almost always find someone willing to let you pitch a tent in their yard for the night. Although that gets interesting sometimes...
No, I had one for a while. I wrote several drafts of a book, but never got all the way through the publishing process. Life always got in the way of following through on publication.
The trip was 1998-99. With the advent of e-publishing, I have it on the back burner to publish the account in the next few years. I'd like my kid to be able to read it someday.
Who is this guy? This trip is going to be more challenging than ascending Mt Everest. Unless this guy is an extreme adventure hiker, this is going to end badly or he is going to quit. I hope for his sake he gives up early.
If this were a trip planned by someone like Andrew Skurka, then I'd believe it, but this is a journalist with a crazy plan.
As cool as this is, the original humans probably did most of this route by boat along the coast. They had to have done the hop to Australia by boat circa 45,000 years ago; they probably crossed the Red Sea by boat; and why else would the diaspora have been so fast along thousands of miles of coast relative to expansion inland?
For me walking is more conducive to careful thinking than any other activity, and taking a walk has frequently proven to be the best way to work on my hardest problems, deepest mysteries, and most stressful situations. Do others walk to think?
Having worked with several startups over the past 16 years, I'll make the observation that I've been in a tiny minority on this count, and I find myself wondering what kind of situational & cultural biases in the startup world work against walking as a way of thinking. Keyboards, cars, commutes, an obsession with faster-is-better, craving novelty, fear of "missing the window." What else?