Keeping a Small Notebook of Your Walks
We've talked about three times a week beating fancy gear. This lesson is about the cheapest piece of equipment I own, and it isn't gear at all. It's a small notebook.
I've kept one for years. Not a journal, nothing with feelings in it particularly, just a record. Date, trail, how far, how it felt, what the weather was doing. It takes me maybe ninety seconds after a walk. I do it sitting in the truck before I even drive home, because if I wait until I'm inside I'll forget, and a thing not written down scatters. I believe that about most of life, not just walking.
Here's why it matters more than people think.
It shows you the pattern you can't feel day to day
You don't notice yourself getting better one walk at a time. Nobody does. The improvement is too slow to feel in the moment. But if you write down that the switchback climb took you twenty-two minutes in March and it takes you sixteen in May, that's not a feeling, that's a fact, and it's the kind of fact that keeps a person going on the mornings they don't want to.
I noticed the pattern with my grandfather's country, actually, long before I noticed it with my own legs. He walked mountain country in Bolivia his whole life, and I think a body remembers things the mind forgets. Writing my walks down is my version of that. I can't inherit his legs, but I can inherit the habit of paying attention to ground covered.
What to actually write down
Keep it simple or you won't keep it at all. I write:
- The date and which trail
- Roughly how far and how long
- How I felt at the start, the middle, and the end (one word is fine: fine, tired, strong, cold)
- Anything unusual: too much water, not enough, a rolled ankle, a snake skin, weather that turned
That last category is where the good stuff lives. The numbers tell you your fitness. The notes tell you your life.
A story about a notebook entry I still think about
Second week Maria and I started walking together, we did a ridge trail with a climb near the end that I hadn't sized up correctly. She beat me to the top. Sat down on a rock and got out her phone and pretended to be reading something very important on it, like she'd been up there for ten minutes doing correspondence, when really she'd just been faster than me and wanted me to know it without saying so.
I wrote that down that night. Just a line: "Maria beat me up the ridge, acted like she hadn't." I still have that page. I bring it up to her more than she'd like, and she has never once apologized, and honestly I hope she never does, because the bit only works if she doesn't.
That's the kind of thing a notebook saves that your memory won't. Not the mile times. The rock she sat on.
For sure for sure, it changes how you walk
Once you know you're going to write the walk down, you pay closer attention while you're on it. You notice the temperature at the trailhead. You notice how your knees feel on the way down, which matters, because we've talked about how the descent is where the trouble starts. You notice the plants, which I didn't used to do until a woman in her seventies told me the names of half a dozen things I'd walked past a hundred times without seeing. I went home and looked them all up and wrote them in the book so I wouldn't lose them again. I haven't.
A notebook turns a walk from something that happens to you into something you're a participant in. That's not a small difference over a year of walking three times a week.
You don't need anything fancy
A spiral notebook from the drugstore is fine. Mine cost about two dollars and I've filled four of them. You don't need an app, though I know some people like one, and that's fine too. I tried a fitness watch once and gave it up within a month because I spent more time looking at my wrist than the trail. A notebook doesn't buzz at you. It just waits until you're ready to write in it.
Don't make this your sunday best project, either. Don't buy a leather-bound journal and feel like every entry needs to be beautiful. Mine has coffee rings on it and half the entries are four words long. That's the right amount of effort. The value is in doing it every time, not doing it well.
Before next time
Grab any notebook you've got lying around the house, even a half-used one from a junk drawer, and write down your very next walk before you let yourself forget it happened.