TLDR: I’m going to start ‘commuting by foot’ 5 miles home, initially on an ‘at least twice a week’ basis with an aspiration to make this significantly more frequent, perhaps turn it into a regular daily thing. Who’s with me?
Longer personal story:
I live in London, and while I live under 5 miles from work, the nature of London rush-hour commuting (by bus) is that it usually takes me over an hour door-to-door to get to or from work.
I don’t find this awful in itself – I can read on the bus! But I was finding that my motivation to do exercise before/after work was rather blunted by those extra hours at each end of the working day.
Until I realised “wait a sec, ‘under 5 miles from work’, what’s my problem?”… last night I tested out coming home from work on foot. Mixture of running and walking (I haven’t run for best part of a year, 5 miles is well out of my range!) and I got somewhat lost(!) on the way back which added a mile to my journey, but even then didn’t take much longer than the bus (about an hour and a quarter for 5.8 miles. Hardly fast, but over 5 miles that would mean about an hour with no increase in average speed).
It’s a bit of a faff as I don’t have shower/locker at work, plus I’m pretty out of practice and so a bit sore today, but my aim is to do this at least twice a week from now on. If I can sort out logistics and get a bit more in practice, I don’t see why I shouldn’t do this at least coming home as my usual homewards commute, and maybe (big need for locker/shower at this point!) on the way in too. Builds exercise into the day… and the money saved is just gravy! I'll just have to see how I deal with weather changes - I was lucky that last night was dry and cold but not freezing!
Sure loads of you already run longer distances to work - but if there are any exercise neophytes out there in a similar situation to me, please do join me!