Give me ENERGY!

Do you want to start walking, but have no-where nice to go? For me, that was quite an excuse. Around the oval twice is not my cup of tea, I get bored easily (and I used to get tired too).

I remember when I used to live on a main road, and was never excited to go for a walk. For a long time, I didn’t know that there were many lovely walking routes very close to my house. I even pulled out the street directory periodically and lamented about the lack of nice places to walk near my house. That was until I talked to my brother (a bundle of energy), and found out many nice places were around, they just didn’t show up on the map!

While I couldn’t handle more than three laps around the oval down the street, I went from walking 5 minutes a day, to being able to walk 45 minutes, just because I enjoyed where I went and did it regularly.

You might not have a very active brother that has explored your whole neighborhood, but you can have Google Maps. Simply type in your address or suburb and country (don’t worry, it’s not saved anywhere), and you’ll find a map of your area! You can click and drag the map around and zoom in and out for detail. But that’s only half the fun:

Google Maps allows you to switch to a aerial image of your neighborhood, meaning you can see patches of trees, roofs, and often even who has a pool on your street! This is a great advantage, as you can then map out a route that includes a lot of patches of trees, making your short walk more enjoyable. You can even save and print your maps, and show the aerial photo, with street names on top!

Many people have found this useful for walking already, and quite a few have their own recommendations and tools!

If you have any ideas, let me know in the comments!

Filed under: tips