Conversation Is Exercise for Something
New module. This one's called The Talking Part, which is either the most obvious title I've come up with or the truest one. Probably both.
I've spent two whole modules on posture and pace. Now I want to poke at the thing that actually fills up the mile and a half for most people, which is talking.
Here's a claim worth testing: conversation on this walk is doing real work. Not just passing time until we get back to the cars. Something is actually happening in there, some kind of exercise, and I don't fully know what to call it. I've turned it over a lot and I still don't have a clean answer, so I'm not going to pretend I do just to sound like I've got it figured out.
This is what I've noticed instead.
The loop makes people say true things
Something about walking side by side, not facing each other, lets people say things they wouldn't say across a table. I've heard this from other PTs too, that patients talk more freely in the car or on a walk than in an exam room where you're staring at each other. I think it's the same mechanism here.
You're not making eye contact the whole time. You've got somewhere to look. Your hands have something to do, which is nothing, they're just swinging. All that space seems to let the actual thing come out instead of the version you'd give if someone asked you directly.
I didn't design the group around this. I noticed it after the fact, the same way I noticed my back stopped complaining once I started taking lunch as a loop instead of a sandwich at my desk.
A practical way to test this at home
You don't need my group to get this benefit. If you're walking with a spouse, a kid, a neighbor, try this.
Walk side by side, not one person leading. If somebody's a full stride ahead the whole time, you've turned it back into a march, and marches don't invite conversation the same way.
Ask one real question early and then let it sit. Not "how was your day," that one's dead on arrival. Something with an actual answer required. "What's something you've been putting off." "What's on your mind that you haven't said out loud yet." Then don't fill the silence. I mean this literally. Count to ten in your head if you have to. People need runway to get to the real answer.
Don't fix anything for the first ten minutes. This is the hard one for me, because I'm a fixer by trade. But if you jump straight to solving, people stop telling you things. Let them talk before you start problem-solving.
Lily's question
My youngest, Lily, walked the loop with me last spring. She's maybe eight at the time. We get about halfway up and she asks me why the foothills are brown when the mountains behind them are green.
I didn't have a good answer. Something about elevation and moisture, snowpack up high versus dry ground down low, I gave her a version of that, but I was making it up as I went and she could probably tell.
What I remember more than the question is that she kept going. She wasn't satisfied with my half-answer so she kept turning it over out loud, working through her own theories, most of which didn't hold up, but she didn't care. She just liked having the space to think out loud next to somebody who wasn't going to tell her she was wrong.
That's the whole thing right there. I didn't need the right answer about elevation. I needed to be a person walking next to her while she worked something out. That's what I mean when I say conversation is exercise for something. She wasn't asking me a question so much as she was exercising a muscle, and the walk was just the gym.
One caution
If you're walking with somebody and a real conversation opens up, watch your footing anyway. I've seen people trip over curbs and roots mid-sentence because all their attention went into the conversation and none of it went into the ground. Slow down if you need to. The talk isn't worth a rolled ankle.
Before next time
Try the one real question on your next walk, with anybody, and then actually count to ten before you say anything back. See what happens in that gap.