What useful thing can I do or learn while walking an hour every day?

September 4, 2024 1:05 PM

My health has improved, and I am now walking up to an hour every day. This is great news, but I'd like to be doing something else useful at the same time, as I'm getting tired of podcasts and audiobooks, which are difficult for me to pay attention to sometimes.

I have been listening to podcasts and audiobooks, but this is starting to get a bit tiresome. Ideally, I'd like to do something a bit more productive while also walking.

I am walking outside on a dedicated wilderness trail (old railroad bed) near my house. There are no cars, but other walkers, runners, and bikers, and rare horses and riders.

I'm walking at a rapid pace for me-- 3.0 - 3.5 miles per hour (roughly 5 kph), and while I can sort of hold a conversation on the phone, it is a bit awkward. My heartrate is usually around 120 beats per minute, if that helps contextualize things. I don't think I can do anything with my hands, so no knitting or other handicrafts. I also often walk quite early in the morning, so calling friends and talking to them is not ideal this time of day. I'm also an introvert, so that wouldn't be my first choice anyway.

Ideas I've had:
1. A more learning based audio file, maybe Spanish language training? Are there podcasts or courses that are designed with no or minimal simultaneous writing or visual components?
2. Figure out some way to review calendar and tasks audibly, and make new entries and voice memos. I have an older Google Pixel 3 phone. And I use Google calendar and mostly a paper task list, which I definitely cannot write on while walking.
3. ???

Podcasts I've been listening to are Empire, The Rest is Entertainment, How to Fail, Peter Attia Drive, Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, and 99% Invisible. It helps if the podcasts are around an hour in length or less, so I can finish one each day, but that isn't essential. I guess I'll take recommendations for new podcasts, even though it isn't working out particularly well for me right now.

Books I've listened to are Getting Things Done, Robert Caro's Working, Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, and next up is Caro's biography of LBJ, but that is too dense to listen to every day.

My brain also has a tendency to zone out from continuous speech after a while, so I find myself unconsciously losing my place in a podcast or book. I am also not primarily an auditory learner-- I get frustrated at the slow speed of speech and my brain is continually reminding me that I can read 20 times faster than I can listen and that this is inefficient.

I've haven't listened to audio fiction since 1979 when 11-year-old-me gritted his teeth and made the long-haul of getting through "Two Years Before the Mast" back when it was called Books on Tape. Maybe there is some sort of fiction that would work in this setting, but I'm doubtful.

I'd also be open to any walking meditation practice, but know nothing about it, except for the Heart Math biofeedback monitor the VA gave me, which I use and which seems to be OK.

Any advice would be gratefully received, thank you! This new walking is really changing my health, and I am on a 97-day continuous streak of walking every day, and I don't want to stop.

posted by seasparrow to Health & Fitness (17 answers total)

I habitually do a kind of walking meditation whenever I walk alone, which is basically just rhythmic breathing, timed to my footsteps: Breathe in for N footfalls; breathe out for N footfalls; repeat. Adjust N as needed (e.g., when I'm going up a hill, N may be 3 or even 2; when on the flat, N may be 4 or 6). This is extremely easy to do and really quite pleasant in my experience.

Since you're on a wilderness trail, another thing you could do is start learning to identify the birds, trees, other plants & animals, etc. that you see while out on your walks. This can be great for getting you "out of your own head" and building a sense of connection to your local natural environment.
posted by heatherlogan at 1:17 PM on September 4 [7 favorites]

bird watching
memorizing and reciting poetry - you can read the poem ahead of time and/or listen to it on your walk, then pause it and see how much you can recite
Mango Languages has a hands free autoplay setting. Many public libraries have a subscription to the app that you can use with a library card.
posted by carrioncomfort at 1:18 PM on September 4 [3 favorites]

You can learn to identify plants. One way to start would be to just look up a plant or two for your area, then see how many you can spot.
Going the other way, you can pause briefly to take a pic and then look it up at home.

You can do the same for insects or fungi, rocks etc. iNaturalist/Seek is the best app, if you want to use apps.

You can also work on musical stuff, like learning how to whistle or beatbox.
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:00 PM on September 4 [7 favorites]

Language Transfer is a great free, audio-only language course.

Also, depending what level you’re at, one thing I’ve found really useful for language learning in the past, in languages where I have at least some grounding, is to choose an episode of a podcast in my target language, and just listen to that same episode again and again. It’s great because the idea is mostly to just let the sound wash over you, exposing you to sounds and patterns, rather than straining to understand.

To start with it’s just an endless stream of noise; then you understand where the gaps are between words. Then you maybe start to pick out odd words you recognise, then gradually the words either side of those; maybe you actually look up some words that leap out at you… eventually it’s amazing how much your understanding increases over time.

I’ve listened to the same podcast episode every day for a month and it just seemed to seep in. And on days that you can’t be bothered to try at all, it’s just noise washing over you, no effort, but the knowledge that you’re doing something useful as your subconscious absorbs the general sounds and patterns.
posted by penguin pie at 2:31 PM on September 4 [5 favorites]

A lot of college lectures are 50min. I listened to a fun free History of Ancient Rome course from (Stanford? MIT?) ages ago, and while the professor used some slides, I didn't miss them too much and got a lot from context.

If audio seems slow, as you say, try adjusting the speed on your player to 1.5x, it'll feel weird at first but you might like it better.
posted by hovey at 2:48 PM on September 4

I usually listen to postcasts at 1.5-2.0X speed. This really helps - especially with certain podcasts. If it is really technical or information heavy sometimes I have to slow it down to 1X or 1.2X. On the other hand, I know some people listen as fast as 2X and 3X, and maybe even more.

I find this is closer to reading speed, and thus helps keep my attention.

Another listening thing that would be a really nice use of this time would be targeted music listening. For example you could do a survey of all periods of music history from ancient music through medieval, renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th Century, etc. (possible outline here). You could look at one particular instrument or genre, like piano music through the centuries, or string quarters, or song, or opera. Or you could do a sampling of different genres, different world musics, different decades of various genres (say: Jazz, Rock, show tunes, hip-hop, etc). You could do a deep dive in the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Prokofieff, Shostakovitch (etc), or the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Prince, etc etc etc. Just for example I happened across a biography of Benny Goodman at our local library, and so spent a year or so listening to a whole bunch of Benny Goodman. That was really interesting and not something I would usually listen to.

You could pair the music listening with some audiobooks of related topics, like a book about the Beatles interspersed with listening to their music.

Related, you could take a course in classical music, music appreciation, history of rock, etc. These mainly consist of listening - something you could do while walking pretty easily.

The nice thing about music is you can't really listen at 2X speed. Music fills time and listening is going to take a lot of time. So you have an hour a day to dedicate to it . . .
posted by flug at 4:13 PM on September 4 [4 favorites]

Could you stop from time to time, or is it essential to maintain a continuous pace/heart rate? Birding with the Merlin app (identifies songs/calls) could be very slow paced, or it could just be you stop a handful of times during your walk. Searching "birding by ear" will bring up lots of internet resources and podcasts, so it could be a combo of listening to what is singing on the wilderness trail, and then learning more about birds in general. I often just use one earbud on my walks so I don't miss a) fun sounds b) traffic noises.

For Spanish language learning adjacent audio, how about making a Spanish language playlist and listening to that?
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:26 PM on September 4 [1 favorite]

I used FSI (foreign service institute) Platiquemos course. It’s like 8 levels, you download all the sound files and put them on your phone or player.

I skipped the first three levels bc prior study, but listening and repeating, not reading or writing anything, I got to the point where I was able to pass the SAT II and minor in Spanish at university, which led to me being able to get both ESOL and Spanish certificates to teach public school.

The methodology is like, words on a topic, then phrases, then sentences, broken into pieces and then gradually strung back together. I would repeat every utterance 7-10 times to try to remember the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.

I did that for a couple years of commuting 60+ miles each way and it was both satisfying and effective.
posted by toodleydoodley at 4:44 PM on September 4 [2 favorites]

I like to look for something interesting to photograph. Things change a lot from day to day!
posted by Eyelash at 5:39 PM on September 4 [1 favorite]

Download Be My Eyes and spend the hour helping blind and low-vision individuals understand what's around them.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 6:10 PM on September 4

Physio suggested I needed to build up a bit more flexibility, so to take old spare buttons and every twenty steps drop one, then on the return walk, pick them back up again.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 9:53 PM on September 4 [3 favorites]

I often use walking time to work out how to explain complex concepts clearly and concisely.

This is easier to do if you can talk out loud and don't mind looking strange.

Sometimes I do this for problems I need to solve, for example if I'm teaching a subject, I figure out the best way to explain certain concepts to my class. Or I figure out how to fix plot holes in my current book I'm writing.

But I also use it to curb my tendency to ruminate, so I will just explain arbitrary topics like figure out how to clearly explain what binary numbers are, or the rules of a favourite boardgame.
posted by Zumbador at 12:14 AM on September 5 [1 favorite]

I can't tell from what you've said in the question: have you tried doing the walk without headphones?

Like you, I am not an auditory learner, and I struggle to maintain concentration on a podcast or audiobook. On top of that, I find that having my ears blocked at all while I'm walking makes me clumsier, and requires me to concentrate more on navigating my environment, which makes it even harder to take in any information. So when I go for a walk, I rely on the environment itself to keep me from getting bored.

For me, that's a combination of looking for things to take photos of - the sky, the morning light on the trees, an interesting insect on a flower, a distant bird that I want to identify - and paying enough attention to the sounds around me that I notice anything unusual. Which might turn out to be a bird I don't often see, or a fox chasing a water bird, or a chorus of frogs, or the first of the spring migrants returning to the reedbeds... all sorts of things make noise, and once you get used to the normal sounds along the route, anything different really catches your attention. Over time, the unfamiliar becomes familiar. It only takes a few rounds of "that's a weird noise - what's making it - oh, it's that heron!" to learn that that's the noise a heron makes, even if you only hear a heron a couple of times a month. Gradually, you get to have a much fuller understanding of what's around you as you walk.

So that's basically a +1 to all the people saying "birdwatching" and similar.

I also find birdsong and other natural noises (wind in trees, for instance) inherently calming, so that's a side benefit.

I know "useful" here is in the eye of the beholder - it certainly pleases me to be able to put a name to what I hear and see, but it's not useful in the way that learning a language might be useful - but perhaps it will suit you too?

The other thing is that, like Zumbador, I find that walking frees my brain up to think. If I need to process something, or solve a problem, walking in the countryside is a good way to do it. I talk to myself if I need to (holding my phone up against my ear if I think people might come round a corner and surprise me).
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 1:43 AM on September 5 [1 favorite]

If you are a nature lover, learning to identify trees and plants can be very absorbing. I sometimes forget to put on a podcast because while walking I'm always noticing growing things, both wild and in people's gardens. Are they unusual, are they at an interesting time in their seasonal growth, are they doing well or not, are they well suited to their space, were they planted or self-sown, are they forageable, and so on. Sometimes they have seeds that I might scatter elsewhere I'd like to see them grow. I realise for for most people this would probably be uninteresting!

Same with birdwatching, of course, and recognising bird calls. It turns background noises into interesting information.

And yes, walking is good time to think. Often, in my case, imaginary conversations in my head, or going over old memories.
posted by snarfois at 2:56 AM on September 5

I like to look for and make note of nonhuman animals. Insects count. Birds count, squirrels, dogs, cats--as long as they're in the animal kingdom, they count. If I can hear the animal but not see it, it still counts. If there really is zero fauna, I'll decide to count mushrooms and babies. Best is if at least one animal is within eye or earshot the entire duration of the walk. If they seem scarce and your streak is about to be broken, don't forget to look up. There's always a chance you may see a butterfly wafting by or a disgruntled crow squatting on a light pole.
posted by Don Pepino at 10:18 AM on September 5 [1 favorite]

Here's a list of free Android plant identification apps, in case that's helpful.
posted by underclocked at 10:20 AM on September 5

I would read (not during a walk, at some other time)How to Read A Tree or How to Read Water, and then practice noticing these things on your walk. Can you tell compass directions from the way moss is growing on trees on your walk? From the way the soil is differently eroded from the roots on different sides of the trees? Can you tell what kinds of plants grow upstream from looking the way light reflects off a stream/river? All these kinds of things.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:56 PM on September 7