No excuses. Walking Heads did not get off to a flying start on the first day of Walk to Work Week. But, with some help from our friends at Inner Ear, we were soon at the top of the local workplace league. Fay Young explains how we did it…
As earworms go it’s not at all bad: Aye waulking o, waulking aye an weary. It’s the chorus from an old Burns song to a haunting melody, and for some odd reason it was running through my mind for many of the miles we covered during the Living Streets Walk to Work Week. Not that walking should be confused with waulking, the ancient method of softening tweed.
Waulking traditionally involved thumping – or treading – the stiff newly woven fabric after it had been soaked in máistir. That’s Gaelic for ‘household ammonia’. Look it up! Whatever else the weather threw at us while we travelled across Glasgow this month, it certainly wasn’t stale urine (either sheep’s or human variety).
There was plenty of weather though: cold, windy and wet Scottish spring weather.
No excuses, the first day of our walking week got off to a pretty pathetic start. Having taken part in the Living Streets Great British Walking Challenge three years ago (when this member of the Walking Heads team clocked up a not unimpressive 62 miles during the month of May) I was disappointed to manage a mere mile at the start of this year’s Walk to Work event. One mile! A combination of torrential rain and a writing deadline that could only be met at the computer indoors meant that I only just made it to the office and back.
Never give up. “You’ve walked 1 mile: Keep going! You have walked 1 mile.” The lovely Living Streets website is programmed to give encouragement – that first day’s effort meant half a muffin burned!
Things could only get better. Next day, the rain eased up. I bought a pedometer and by then the other two members of the team – Amanda Mitchell and Benny Robb – from Inner Ear had joined in.
To the rescue
“Amazing, we’re top of the workplace league,” I emailed on Wednesday.
As it happens they already walk a fair distance to and from their office in the Hidden Lane off Argyle Street every day. Amanda was tracking her regular route on Google Maps and Benny was logging the miles along river, railways and roadsides. He emailed back:
If you want to add in my mileage this week, I’m currently walking 3.1 miles home each day (according to my route on Google Maps) and managed to clock up 4.5 miles yesterday walking into the office from town as well as my usual walk back home.
There’s nothing like a little friendly rivalry to keep you going. Between us, the Living Streets chart showed, we began to outpace local teams from Scottish Government and Strathclyde Public Transport. Amanda had to stop for a celebration selfie when she saw she was beating her former workplace, City of Glasgow College.
Amanda’s celebration selfie ‘hats off to the team!’
Meanwhile my pedometer was getting good use. I might add that I burned out my last pedometer when I forgot to take it off for a dance class and the poor thing went into meltdown. Walking up and down city streets is not so strenuous but it was good to see the daily totals increasing: from 5,000 steps on Tuesday to 8,000 on Thursday and almost 9,000 by Friday night. Congratulations, says Living Streets, you have burned five muffins.
So we walked and walked and by the end of the week, according to Living Streets, Britain’s walkers had logged 78, 679 miles: “half way round the moon.” We can’t claim for sure that we were the top workplace in Glasgow – “You’ve walked so many miles our site is struggling to keep on top of the sums!” said the message from Living Streets the last time we looked. But our board shows that Walking Heads and Inner Ear covered a very respectable 41 miles – walking to and from the office, travelling by foot rather than taxi, bus or train to meetings, and, of course, researching new routes for our audio tours on the city streets. All without benefit of máistir. Or muffins for that matter.
Hats off to Amanda!
By the way, that waulking refrain running through my mind is said to be an adaptation by Robert Burns who contributed a new first verse to the reworking of a traditional song. But if you listen to original recordings of such songs they tend to be rougher and more robust – like the raw tweed itself – as they are improvised by women working the cloth hour after hour to an infectious, pounding, rousing rhythm.
Simmer ‘s a pleasant time,
Flowers of every colour;
The water rins o’er the heugh,
And I long for my true lover!
Chorus
Ay waukin, Oh,
Waukin still and weary:
Sleep I can get nane,
For thinking on my Dearie.
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