Somewhere along the Capital Ring through Horsenden Hill, learning it’s not such a flat city after all.
Now that I'm firmly ensconced in the life stage known as "I have discovered nature", I've progressed from all-weather swimming into full blown hiking. We're not talking rigorous mountains or even something elegant like the Ridgeway – I have simply walked a 78 mile (126 km) circle around London. There's plenty of grit on the Capital Ring, but it's also a surprisingly green walking route – in either case it was a great way to spend 13 summer afternoons. It made me love the city even more, and I enjoyed the whole thing a lot.
Does anybody start these kinds of outdoor pursuits for the love of nature? I ventured into round-the-year swimming not for any real interest in the water, but because the pandemic had made me feel insane and I needed to DO something. Things are less intense now, thankfully, but my desire to walk for hours on end didn't come from any burning interest in exploring London's heritage woodlands or tributary rivers (although, don't knock it). I can trace my interest in hiking back to last Christmas, when I was watching an ungodly amount of YouTube in a stupor which turned out to be anaemia. There I was, watching a woman gutting and renovating a cottage in the Swedish countryside all by herself, when the great algorithm decided I would probably also like to watch videos of people going on months-long hikes. I became fascinated with these videos for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on, but eventually figured it probably had to do with their energetic forward motion, something I had very little of at the time. A few months later, when iron was again properly oxygenating my tissues, I decided to go for a walk and see if maybe this was something I could enjoy too? I really had no idea, so I picked something that looked easy enough and was close to home in case it sucked. The first section of the Capital Ring is 7.2 miles long and I had no frame of reference - is that a lot? It sure was a lot for me at the time, but it's really not a lot anymore.
I've also realised I like walking, a lot! I like putting one foot in front of the other, in silence, for hours. I like going out with a bag of peanut M&Ms which I portion out to myself, as I take breaks exactly when I want to. Walking the city has become one of my favourite things to do, as it connects together the neighbourhoods like a puzzle that's always had gaps.
But most of all, I like walking for what it does to my head. I imagine it’s what it would feel like to shove a scrub brush into my brain and run it through the nooks and crannies, getting all the gunk out. Katherine May put it more eloquently in her walking memoir, The Electricity of Every Living Thing: "I have had my time in the wilderness. I have been alone. Somewhere along the last hundred miles, I completed a cycle of thought." At the end of a day of walking, I take my clear head and go home.
When it’s cold, swimming does the same thing, and honestly it does it faster and more efficiently too. Part of the satisfaction is in the repetition – simply going to the pond no matter the weather, again and again, or heading out for a walk, putting one foot in front of the other. But either way, the pleasure is in doing the thing, over and over – to give the body something all-consuming to do, so that the mind can be free.
Readings
For this month's article recommendations from around the internet, head over to Reading List, Where The Give Is edition.
Flott aktivitet!