I’m no April fool, but spring has been playing tricks on all of us this year. It seems to tease a warm up but then chill out the next day and offer up a little bit more snow.

Case in point. Yesterday I did my first of the fifty walks series, and I didn’t even need my wool cap. This morning, less than a day later I am sitting in a Starbucks to write the recap of that walk and looking out the window at the swirling mini blizzard we mustered up to celebrate.

Fifty is a lot of walks. I’m gonna need to try to do roughly two long walks per week if I’m going to hit that goal. It’s also going to be interesting to try and write something interesting about each of them.

The Route

To start, I suppose I should just say that I made it simple for my first: I walked out the front door and took the still new-ish long path up along the mini-freeway that passes by our neighbourhood. That path is about four and a half klicks long from our intersection (it goes south for about two).

From there, and reaching a kind of inability to go any further north for the moment, I tucked into the nearby neighbourhood and crosscut it towards where I knew the creek trails joined up.

We run in the creeks all the time, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve just gone and walked that path. Years, really. Most of the ice was still packed onto the trails down there, but it wasn’t so bad that it was impassible or anything.  It was slow going, but for that I blame my photography urges.

I climbed back out of the creek valley at the end of that trail and followed the asphalt back towards home. 

Eleven klicks. Exactly. I started and stopped my watch at the foot of my driveway and it read 11.01km. 

The Effort

As I noted I spent a lot of time distracted taking pictures. Shockingly, you may be surprised that I even tried doing some “strolling selfies” propping my camera up against a tree or a light standard and using the remote shutter features of my AirPods to try and nab an interesting solo shot. I think I might still need to work on that.

The walk took nearly three hours all in. That’s a lot of solo time in the city. I was doing the (obviously simple) math of that while I was wandering along and taking breaks from the audiobook I was listening to: fifty walks at three hours a piece is a hundred and fifty hours of walking and at least five hundred klicks. I’m gonna need to figure out some better shoes, too.

Of course, finding fifty walks in this city that are unique and interesting and places “I don’t usually go” is going to be probably my biggest challenge. I can walk laps around neighbourhoods but (a) I need to get to a starting place and (b) what’s so interesting about laps around yet another suburban wasteland? I suspect a good portion of my walks will be out my front door and exploring some of the single track or side trails that I don’t visit while running (and definitely can’t get to in a car) and there’s nothing wrong with that. Rules are not so strict as to have me plotting against my own self-interest and success after all.

I also need to figure out how I can bring along a better camera or a audio capture device, both better than just my phone. Travelling light is great, but a dozen times along the way yesterday I thought to myself it would have been great to have my SLR or my Zoom recorder.

The Highlight

Part way into the creek trail I went off route, and wandered down a side path along the thawing creek. There is still a pretty solid build up of winter ice, but the water is flowing through the gaps, gurgling and rushing atop and through the melting spaces. I took some photos and stood there listening to the creek for about five minutes.  Birds sounded all around and the city disappeared from my awareness. It was a moment.

If I can find something like that on the next forty nine walks I think I’ll easily be able to call it a success.