There was a stretch of about eight months where I did almost no walking at all. Not because I did not want to, and not because I was especially busy. It was because I had decided somewhere along the way that a walk was a half day thing. Drive somewhere, do eight or ten miles, come back tired. And since I could only assemble a half day about twice a month, that is how often I went out.
The thing that broke it was an evening when I had about forty minutes and went out anyway, expecting to feel cheated. I walked to the end of the lane behind the farm, along the hedge, and back. Barely two miles. I did not feel cheated at all. I felt better than I had after several of the big ones, and I have thought about why ever since.
The threshold I had set was the actual obstacle
The eight mile standard was not making my walking better. It was making my walking rare. And rare walking is worse than frequent short walking on almost every measure I care about.
A route you walk twice a month is a route you never learn. I could not have told you where the gates were on any of my long routes. Now I know the short loop well enough to notice when something has changed, which turns out to be most of what makes walking interesting to me.
The other thing the high threshold did was make each walk a production. Kit, planning, food, driving. Any of those can be the thing that stops it happening. A two mile walk requires boots and a door.
The first mile does most of the work
Whatever it is that a walk does to my head, it happens early. If I am tangled up about something, it has usually loosened by the time I am through the second gate. The following six miles are enjoyable but they are not doing anything additional to that.
I am not making a claim about anyone else here, and I am certainly not making one about health. I only mean that the specific thing I go walking for arrives well before the halfway point of a long route, and I spent years assuming it accumulated steadily the whole way.
Short walks fit around weather instead of fighting it
A long walk commits you to whatever the sky does for four hours. A short one lets you go in the gap. I have walked in some of the best conditions I have seen this year purely because I could look out, see it had stopped, and be out of the door in two minutes.
It also means bad weather stops mattering much. Twenty minutes of rain on a two mile loop is not a problem, it is just wet. Twenty minutes of rain three miles from the car with two hours still to go is a different situation and it makes me more conservative about going out at all.
The route quality bar drops, usefully
When I was only walking twice a month, each walk had to be worth the drive, which meant it had to be somewhere good. That ruled out almost everything within ten minutes of home, because none of it is spectacular. It is field edges, a drain with willows along it, a track between two farms.
Once the walks got short, none of that had to justify itself. I was not spending anything to be there. And the ordinary ground turned out to hold my attention far better than I expected, because I was seeing it often enough to notice change: a hedge cut, a new gate, the water level in the drain, where the deer are crossing this month.
I would not have predicted that. I thought I liked walking for views. It seems I mostly like walking for familiarity, and familiarity is only available at high frequency.
The two mile loop changed what I carry
This is a small thing that turned out to matter. On a long walk I take a bag: water, food, a layer, the light, a couple of other bits. Packing that bag is about five minutes, and five minutes is enough friction to lose a walk to.
On the short loop I take nothing except a phone in a pocket. No bag at all. That sounds obvious written down, but I spent the first month of short walks still packing as though I were going out for four hours, because that was the habit. Once I stopped, the walk went from a thing I arranged to a thing I just did.
The one exception is winter, when I put a small light in my coat pocket and leave it there from October to March so there is no decision involved.
What I lost, because there is something
I do not want to pretend this is free. Long walks give you something short ones do not, and it is roughly this: after about four hours you stop thinking about anything at all. That state is real and I miss it. Two miles does not get anywhere near it.
There is also a fitness difference and I noticed it. When my longest walk in a month was two and a half miles, the first long one I did afterwards hurt more than it should have. So I keep one longer walk a month on the calendar, and I treat it as a different activity rather than a bigger version of the same one.
How it works now
Three or four short ones a week, one long one a month if I can get it. The short ones are on two routes I know completely, so there is no planning and no decision to make, which is the point. The decision is the expensive part.
If I were saying one thing to someone who keeps meaning to start walking and does not: pick a loop from your own front door that takes half an hour, and do not make it good. Make it available. You can find the good ones later, and you will find them faster once you are outside every couple of days rather than twice a month.