Can you Sport Walk in a city, town or suburban environment? Of course you can. Sport Walking is about walking strongly, it’s about embracing challenge and it’s fundamentally about your approach to walking, not the location or environment.
While Sport Walking in the wilderness, countryside or mountainous terrain brings immense satisfaction, urban environments can provide their own challenges. Plotting a route through a busy city can be a challenge in itself but it’s a great opportunity to see parts of the city that you might not normally see on a commute, business or leisure trip.
There are probably going to be parks and maybe waterways to start you off but then there are other potential route options – linking places of interest, historic buildings or maybe (if you’re lucky) city walls.
In London, for instance, the obvious Sport Walk route is the Thames Path but, equally, you could plot a course across town from north to south. We once took part in a charity fundraiser in support of an anti-slavery charity, which snaked from Canary Wharf in Docklands all the way to Buckingham Palace, passing by loads of historic landmarks that had an association with slavery.
While this was a charity walk, you could create your own routes that have personal significance, passing all number of different landmarks from famous music venues to all the museums or galleries. For us, the walk was about 20km and even though it was at a slower pace than we might do ourselves, it was still a really good test.
The best part though was that we discovered so many places that we’ve never seen before and we know London really well! It took us to parts that we’d never normally go to, specifically because of the links we were all seeking.
Sport Walking in cities is a different kind of challenge, where pure speed isn’t the best objective because you’re almost guaranteed to fail due to the sheer volume of people on the streets.
In fact, every time we’re in London on the South Bank and we see people trying to get a run in during their lunch break, they’re always struggling to get past tourists and probably add half a kilometre in extra distance zig zagging round everyone.
Of course that just really applies in the busy tourist hotspots of a city centre. You can have a much clearer path in suburbs if that’s what you prefer but either way, it’s best to focus more on other aspects of challenge for city Sport Walking, just simply because you can’t guarantee you’ll be able to hold your best pace all the time.
So, whether you Sport Walk in a city or town because that’s the limit of your day to day territory or maybe as a curiosity, we say go for it, you might be surprised at how rewarding it can be!
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