A Brief Introduction to Walking DC

The beauty of a city like DC is that the more efficient route is often public transportation or walking rather than driving. The nightmare of parking downtown, traffic, and the general boredom that comes with speeding up and then stopping at a stop sign every block lends itself to alternative options.

I am lucky enough to be fully ambulatory and exercise this ability almost every day, crisscrossing the city on one of my habitual jaunts. If I lived somewhere else, say a medium-sized Midwestern city or out in the suburbs, I doubt I would walk as much, if at all. Like most people, I default to the most efficient activity, and for the most part, DC’s density and design lends itself to walking or biking versus owning and driving a car.

Photo produced on a Sony a6000 on an abnormally warm winter day

The act of walking has experienced a surge in popularity over the last 15 year or so. There are now entire books about walking like Craig Mod’s Kissa by Kissa or The Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gross. Even the New York Times published an article on the merits of walking, boldly titled Whatever the Problem, It is Probably Solved By Walking. The author, Andrew McCarthy, managed to succinctly demonstrate the merits of walking while also plugging his most recent book about a 500-mile pilgrimage along the Camino Del Santiago in Spain. It turns out that Andrew was not alone. There has been a marked increase in interest and activity in the Camino Del Santiago. In 2024, approximately 440,371 people applied for their pilgrim badge, certifying they had completed at least 100 miles of the pilgrimage from any of multiple routes, the longest of which stretches just over 600 miles. The number of pilgrims has increased every year post-COVID and is 25% higher than pre-2020 levels.

Even the productivity hacks have latched onto walking as an activity in and of itself, rather than a cost-efficient way of getting from A to B. In conjunction with turning off notifications on your phone, taking time to meditate, and of course “deep work” (whatever that means), authors like Cal Newport have extolled the virtues of walking as a way to slow down, reflect, recharge, and optimize your lifestyle.

“I walked without any destination in mind, working my way slowly around my neighborhood. I loved it. It was surprisingly difficult on the legs.”

I have an argument to make about the whole thing that hopefully doesn’t fetishize the experience of doing something utterly and innately boring - namely, that walking without external distractions is a damn good way to get a better sense of a city. I started this when I lived in Chicago. I had been reading about Craig Mod’s walks across Japan (mentioned above), which he does without headphones or his phone, leaning into a slower pace in order to see what he can find. He had worked in tech and had rejected a traditional path in favor of the slower approach: letting things come to him rather than serving as a black hole of content consumption to distract from the small screen-based type of production that today’s white-collar worker produces. Craig was inspiring, mostly because he convinced me that I was missing things, small things, that I would never find if I was just traveling from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. When I started walking, I felt like I knew a lot about my neighborhood and Chicago itself. I had found a bunch of cool restaurants dotted across the city, had biked to trendy coffee shops, and identified neighborhood dive bars that were tacky and weird but sold domestic lite beer for $3.50 a can. I could have told you my cross streets and the cross streets of those cross streets, the restaurants near me, and the cross streets near them. I didn’t have a car (I still don’t) since it just wasn’t necessary. But whenever I walked, I did so with my headphones in, focused only on getting to a place rather than the walk itself.

I walked about 26 miles over the course of 3 days: 2 hours on a Friday evening, 4 hours on a Saturday morning, and 4 hours on a Sunday. I was done in the span of one weekend with time each day to spare. The goal was to slow down and try to look deeper at my neighborhood. I followed some of the rules that Craig had established on his own walks: no headphones and no phone use. I walked without any specific destination in mind, working my way slowly around my neighborhood and then further out. I loved it. It was surprisingly difficult. My legs were tired and the amount of thought it took to not unconsciously pull out my phone when I got bored was almost scary. I didn’t walk away fundamentally changed or more efficient or anything like that. But, at the same time, I didn’t feel like I was deluged by content and struggling to stay afloat. All of my emails were fine; none demanded an immediate response, and it turns out that I am not so essential that someone needs me over the course of 10 hours in one weekend. In fact, I am sure multiple people were quite happy to have me not present for those hours.

I don’t want to assign any substantial changes to my being that resulted from the walk, nor do I want to fetishize the experience as something a self-help book might refer to as “transformative” (it wasn’t). Instead, I would just point to the fact that it did require that I look closer at where I lived and engage with it in a physical way. Partially, I would think, this was due to the sheer boredom from removing the numerous stimuli that seem to easily steal my attention. Whenever I open my phone or computer, I find myself three apps or windows away from my original task, mindlessly consuming some piece of content that I will immediately forget. The walk itself, and the rules surrounding the walk, were simply a forcing function. I couldn’t just drive silently past, insulated by a pane of glass within a climate-controlled vehicle. Nor could I put my headphones in and pass the walk as if I were simply not there, picking the optimal song for the optimal moment and entertaining myself regardless (and irrespective) of anything that was happening outside my little sphere. It was cool in the sense that it was boring, and by being boring I noticed things I would have previously walked right past. There is value in looking closely, seeing more, and slowing down.

“Being bound by the physical constraints of the place, whether its weather, bad sidewalks, or stately tree lined side streets, provides a sense of place that can’t be replicated in a digital manner. ”

I moved back to DC about a year and a half ago. I had gone to college here but never truly ventured outside of my little bubble of campus life. In school, I interned with a large bureaucratic federal agency. I would take the red line directly to my stop before walking into work, only to sit in a cubicle and read my book or pretend to work on some inane Sisyphean task like entering data into a 2000-line Excel spreadsheet. At precisely 4:35 p.m., I would surreptitiously glance at my boss’s office before putting my headphones in and completing my morning journey in reverse—traveling from point A to point B with my only exposure to the city coming from the blur rushing by when the metro was aboveground.

Traveling in this way muted the city and all that it had to offer, simultaneously reducing the friction while silencing any real sense of the city. To truly commit to the theme of this magazine, concentrating on what it means to be “Rooted in the District” demands physical engagement with the place itself. Being bound by the physical constraints of the place, whether its weather, bad sidewalks, or stately tree-lined side streets, provides a sense of place that can’t be replicated in a digital manner. Leaning into the sense of place means celebrating the cracks and chips that comprise the city. It means meandering past the beautiful homes and architecture, walking through the parks, and looking closely where commerce meets community.

I don’t believe that a good walk needs to be a big walk. Of course, it's easier to write a book about a 500-mile walk than it is about a 20-mile walk. Five hundred miles intuitively sounds much cooler and has a sort of heft to it that a long stroll doesn’t. But walking a city in shorter increments still means covering ground, and since DC is easy to walk, that is what I am going to do.

Goal:

I want to look closer. DC is beautiful, anyone can see that, but I want to look for the cracks, the areas where beautiful meets not so beautiful, where the newly built all glass townhouses with only 4 total geometric lines abut beautiful 1900’s townhouses that have been here for almost a century.

Walk Rules:

No headphones.

No phone.

Attempt to focus, to cut through the boredom and look closer.

Write about it.