In praise of walking to work (Part 1)

First, I’d like to share a sense of how far you can get walking 45 minutes. The following — purely by my own feel — is a diagram showing how far you can go if you start walking from a central station. You probably thought, “that’s quite a range,” didn’t you?

To the main topic: why walk? “For physical and mental health” goes without saying at this point, so if I list my own reasons, they come to the following.

This is also the biggest reason I started walking to work. I’m no good with trains and buses (too crowded, they get delayed), and originally I commuted by bicycle. But by bicycle, on rainy days I’d end up on the train anyway, and my commute time was swayed by the weather. And so I arrived at the walking style, where everything depends on my own legs. In fact, taking the same route, a commute with a precision of ±1 minute is possible. And it’s surprisingly fast. Here’s what I sometimes say to train commuters: “Walk a few minutes to the station → wait a few minutes at the station → ride the swaying train a few more minutes → walk a few minutes from the station to the office. Walking the whole way from the start — isn’t the time hardly different?” The person usually says “well, true…,” but I don’t know anyone who started walking because of it. What’s more, I regard this 45-minute walk to work — 1.5 hours round trip — as a buffer. When work piles up and I hit my limit, by swapping it for a bicycle or a taxi I can generate about an hour. I have a history of overcoming countless crises by wielding this life hack.

How you walk; the tools for walking. The more you learn, the deeper it goes — and I’m glad it’s a path worth mastering, a hobby I might keep up until I’m an old man. How to walk long without tiring; how to walk in midsummer sweating as little as possible. Devising those things is fun. Deep as I say it is, let me give a shallow gear introduction. What I’d recommend for people who like to start with the form is “barefoot shoes” — literally, shoes with a barefoot feel. Thin-soled, not tilted forward, letting your toes move freely. As for “what’s good about barefoot?”, the answer that personally convinces me is: “Standing and walking in toe-cramping shoes is like doing a handstand with your hands in fists; balancing on your fingertips with them spread open is more natural, right?” I wear the classics like vivo barefoot and ALTRA, and walking in shoes made for walking really does change the mood.

I love micro-topography, and I want to walk every road in Tokyo. (As a start, I’ve also made it a goal to set foot at every train station in Tokyo.) Because of that, I take a subtly different route each day, and at 45 minutes, a one- or two-minute detour is within the margin of error, so the variations are abundant. If allowed, I’m the type who’d wear the same clothes every day like Jobs — yet apparently I do want to choose a different road each day.

I treasure walking time as thinking time. I’m usually listening to the radio or a podcast, but partway through almost nothing registers, and I let my thoughts wander over all sorts of things. This walking time might be the only time in a day I can enter the zone. Moderate movement of the body, stimulation from the soles of the feet, scenery flowing by at 5 km/h. You can find no end of claims that walking is perfect for thinking things over, and I really do feel the effect. With programming especially, it’s not rare for something to be nearly finished by the time I’ve been walking. (Lately I’ve been walking while fiddling with Claude Code, so I think I can’t go on like this.)

Paired with thinking, it’s often during this walk to work that something strikes me. Linked to the memory of a place — “I thought of that when I finished climbing this hill” — little memory-spots keep growing by the day. Something I noticed while walking and taking photos for this article: the morning light streams in from the side, and there are frequently corners full of anticipation, like in the photo below. I don’t consciously think about it each time, but I can’t help feeling that a slight thrill — “what kind of light is waiting when I turn this corner?” — brings about some good effect.

So there — I’ve rambled through my reasons for walking. The “thrill” I mentioned is of course only on good days; usually I’m plodding along under a thin overcast, my heart just as gloomy. Still, merely by putting one foot in front of the other, I decide “I’m doing something — good for me,” and get through the days. Even if I start at 0% willpower, after walking 45 minutes I always recover about 1% one way or another. Or so I’ve chosen to firmly believe.

Edit : Kenji Okabe @kenjiokabe