Walk Notes: The Year 2024 In Review
Finding myself wanting to do some more exercise and knowing that having novel goals for myself ends up motivating more than most things, in early 2024 I decided to build a bit of a custom suite of tools that helped track my walking.
One of the novel goal setting ideas I had was to split the map of my local area into 45 meter ‘blocks’ that, if visited, would light up on the map. This turned into a really fun (and ongoing!) game of ‘getting all the blocks.’ Here is what 2024 turned out looking like.
After some testing, I found that 45 meters mapped decently onto Seattle’s block size, allowing me to walk in an area up and down the streets and end up filling in the whole area. This indeed proved to be a bunch of fun, even if I do still have a long way to go to fill in everything.
This got me walking up and down places that I never thought I’d end up going. On the surface, the arbitrary nature of it seems like superfluous, but needing the steps (and the time to listen to quote a few audio books), I was able to even start at my home and aim for a single missed block. That simple goal definitely pushed me out to walk more and more.
So I figured, in the style of Spotify Wrapped’s Year In Review, I’d drop a little bit of the stats from this year’s walking.
Part of this little custom system that I had set up for walking was the ability to tag “walk notes.” I can send a photo to my system, perhaps with a bit of a caption, and it would automatically tag where I was when I took it. I found so many little interesting things that brought delight while on my walks, so I figured I’d share some here. Eventually, I’ll have an interactive map set up to browse these, so stay tuned for that.
Walking in fall when the blackberries are ripe gives you all sorts of on-walk snacks! These were some of the best I found that weren’t already picked over!
There’s lots of amazing, shady tree-lined streets if you know where to find them!
There are some truly massive trees out there! The Massive Sequoia Tree, planted in 1927, is a heritage tree in Seattle and the largest tree on private property in the city.
I found so many little hidden paths on my walks. These shady places often join to streets between private yards. Some front doors to home are even on some of these paths.
Seattle’s humor never fails to impress. I did not complete the puzzle.
So yeah. That’s 2024 in walking for me. I hope to ramp it up in 2025. The sun’s even out today, so maybe I’ll make it out while that’s happening. Cheers for now! 🚶♂️