I'm sure, eventually, the novelty of having a GPS will wear off, but for quite some time I've been wondering exactly how far it is from my house to my 'office' in the town centre and how long it takes me. It turns out it's very almost exactly one kilometer from door to door. Today I walked at pace and did it in slightly over nine minutes, when I thought I had it down to about eight. I need to leave a couple of minutes earlier for work!
I've decided to switch the units on the GPS to metric instead of the standard imperial miles we tend to use here. This is mainly because all our maps are metric and when it comes to smaller distances I'm much more comfortable with metres than fractions of a mile, yards and feet. In fact, if I could I'd display both but the unit won't let me. I'll still be converting the kilometers to miles for the blog and generally so I can get an idea of how far I've done. The next step is to learn how to record and follow tracks, which seems pretty simple. Depending on the weather and if I'm free, I might go out for five or six miles, or more, once I finish work.
There we have it, then. If I walk to work and back every day I'll add 10km, 6.2 miles to my weekly total with the return journey taking in a fairly substantial hill. That's 520km, 323 miles per year! Working where I do it's too easy to get a ride home, but I'd like to make the effort to walk as much as possible. Not that I'll hopefully be working here for much longer and I'll be moving into a much more active job, but for the time being it's important to recognise the benefit of walking to work and back.
