How to Walk 100 Days

Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary.

Be alive.

At whatever point you wake up for the day (or night), be alive. I mean it. Take a big, deep breath and feel that heart beating in your chest. This is it. Not the list of things to do today because you didn’t get them done yesterday. Not the appointments or plans or expanse of nothingness before you. You woke up alive, and the only way to have one or one hundred days of anything is to do that — again and again and again. Receive the gift of it.

Don’t plan to walk 100 days.

I made a plan to walk 500 miles¹ in 2025 because of a song. Okay, okay, and maybe because I truly love walking but hadn’t been doing it as much as I’d wanted for awhile now. I’d go in fits and starts, but never with the kind of consistency I craved. My goal didn’t feel daunting, but it did feel stretchy, so to get started I decided to walk every day in January. Maybe you start with five days or maybe a week. Maybe you pick a month to mark the days, but whatever you choose, begin a little closer to the starting blocks and let the benefits build.

Forget the mileage.

No matter what the overarching goal of the year or the month were, I know my body and life aren’t best bound by numbers. Some days, I will feel like walking three miles and others, only a third. Some days, I will have all the time in the world, and others, there’s never enough. We have to let go of the idea that virtue is only found in walks with prescribed distances, step counts, times, or heck, even heart rates. The intention to walk can become what matters most, and surprisingly, the numbers are still there, somewhere, meaning something, just… less.

Have feelings (and use your feet).

If walking in January felt easy and exciting, by February, it felt necessary. I’d get sad and go for a walk. I’d get frustrated and go for walk. I let the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other of walking help me feel less stuck, which some days meant I was walking up to three and four times a day. The bilateral stimulation and rhythmic motion of walking (akin to EMDR!) allows us to process feelings and thoughts instead of absorbing them. That’s so much easier to do when you’re less concerned with external markers or even, have fewer external inputs. A quiet walk alone in nature is a powerful way to face what ails you.

Go off the beaten path.

Be willing to walk where it doesn’t make sense to. Even if, for some of you, that means a walking pad in your living room! Here in the certain parts of the United States, someone tromping through the grass on the side of a busy four lane road makes people wonder. Be the person people are wondering about. I mean sure, look for sidewalks if you can, but sometimes there won’t be there, and guess what? You can still walk. Some of my best and most memorable walks this year have been entirely off the beaten path, and I love the challenge of looking for more uncanny walking spots. You may be surprised how good it feels to take the road less travelled.

Embrace limitations; don’t marry them.

On this journey, I’ve walked in conditions I’d previously considered unwalkable and on purpose. Ice. Rain. Snow. Subzero temps. Distant thunderstorms. Sick kids. Sick husband. Sick me. Many of my coldest walks were outside, but some were on a neighborhood treadmill. I’d walk tenth of a mile loops around the “track” in our alley during the unending days when my family was sick, until one afternoon I burst forth and walked four misty miles circumventing our neighborhood. Most times I walk in the day, but sometimes I walk around and around our block late at night under the stars. You can face limitations and adapt to them, but they do not have to define your experience — or stop you.

Even now, on my 100th day, I’m nearing what I hope is the end of a gnarly bout of laryngitis and upper respiratory something thanks to allergies (maybe a cold?). It’s a beautiful, sunny, sky-blue day and my neighbor invited me to join her at a local walking trail neither of us have tried.

But as much as I want to be there, I’m not there, there. And so, I won’t likely end this day with much more than a mile if I’m lucky. It may be on the same worn path of the sidewalk around our block. But I’ll walk. And it won’t be any less a celebration, because every single step has been a gift.

Sure, by the end of 2025 I hope to be a woman who’s walked 500 miles (and then I will walk 500 more… had to), but today I’m a woman who’s walked 100 days in all manners of ways, and I’m ready to carry over that energy into other areas of my life that could use a little, shall we say, pep in their step.

Thanks for reading,

1. I don’t wear a smartwatch, so this isn’t like, going to the bathroom, walking to the car, or vacuuming the house miles. These are outside my day-to-day living miles where I could legitimately say “I’m going for a walk.”