walking is just one foot in front of the other, right?

The act of walking is so simple in the realms of exercises we have to choose from as humans. It's one we teach ourselves. One foot goes in front of the other.

I have a love-hate relationship with walking. You can tell me of its health benefits. You can preach as a balm for mental health. I know all that.

It's not the physical act of walking I struggle with. The action I start with is the starting.

In less a day, I'll be on a winter break in one of my favourite places for walking in the world. The Blue Mountains. The above photo is my current work laptop backdrop, and every time I see it, I can hear the scraping of sandstone pieces as I walk. It is the walk in along the top of the ridge of Shipley Plateau; the mist hides the Megalong Valley it towers over.

Next time I walk it, I plan to record the sound. It is a rough sound, more than mere gravel on gravel. It gives Eggs-And-Whiskey Voice, Leonard Cohen underfoot. The pieces are flat shards, and make a satisfying hollow clinking when smacked together. A rasping as epochs of sand once pressed together choose to break apart as I press my foot down.

The kinds of hiking and weather I enjoy aren't really crowd-pleasers. I chase the type that gothic writers call the Sublime: misty, rainy, cold, Pure coincidence, I'm sure, that I've been drawn to writing the gothic in the last five years. There are so many solo walks I've done in the Blue Mountains because - for some reason! - no one else is interested in gale-force winds rushing up the valley. That is the nature I chase - the one that makes me grit my teeth and sends chills through me and makes me feel alive. And the knowledge there is a hot shower waiting not far away.

Walking with me in nature is better off called ambling. I walk fucking slow. I have had a friend, injured with a moonboot, still walk faster than me up a set of stairs. I have a wondrously tiny gait. I have compared the number of steps taken at the end of a hike to a friend: I'll often be a few thousand more for the same distance. An absurd dichotomy of my walking is that I walk quickly, but am overall slower.

Slowness is the main reason I prefer walking by myself in the bush. The video here, of my friend Kate and I on the Three Capes Track, is a pretty common sight for me: at least at the beginning of a walk. I'm already a few paces off, never walking alongside. It's a flat track, for goodness' sake! Add in a few stairs, uneven terrain, a slippery down slope, a wobbly creek crossing, and my pace becomes glacial. There's a horrible stress of being beholden to a group of Fit People waiting patiently for you at the next junction. They will often smile, say the right things ('it's no problem'), but then immediately set off again at their cracking pace. But I am a frustrating person to hike with, and then it their frustration frustrates me, and I get embarrassed at my lack of perfect fitness on show for all to pity. I hate letting people down. And when there's an end people are stressed that I won't ever reach (the campsite before dark in the Grose Valley, the shuttle buses at the end of the Tongariro Crossing and Three Capes Track), I get incredibly self-critical. Yes, I've cried. At myself and my limitations and my embarrassment.

I return to what I have written earlier: It's not the physical act of walking I struggle with. Any walk is technically possible for me if people let me walk it slowly enough.

There's also an audacity at existing as a larger person on a trail. Audacity of sweat showing effort (or, just exerting myself in anything about 30% humidity tbh), of being slower, of not appearing like other hikers. Andy Neal posts on instagram about this exact thing: that outdoor and fitness spaces are for every body. After seeing his unbridled joy of being on a trail, I gave myself permission to just exist. To take my time.

It's hard to balance the knowledge of your limitations, and wanting people to feel proud of pushing yourself. A tension between someone not letting people down, and the flaring self-consciousness that comes from everybody knowing you're the slowest person on the trail. The number of hikes I have excused myself from, or been excluded from, is plentiful.

My property I owned had a beautiful gorge that was amazing for swimming in and exploring. It was accessed via a steep gully that I had to psych myself up to head down. No matter how much I walk on trails, I still can't cope with the crushing vertigo I get on slippery downhill terrain. This gorge set off that vertigo every time. I just stopped going.

There's also an irony to me preferring to walk by myself. I am accident-prone, of the rolling-ankle, slipping over, knee-ligament types. I have 3 tears in the same knee, the worst ankle dorsiflexion a podiatrist had ever seen, and am just... clumsy as fuck.

One single stop for a photo, to inspect and touch some moss, will instantly have my walking buddies disappear around the next bend from my sight. And forget it if there's an interesting bird. I have stopped time to watch lyrebirds, cried on my first sighting of a powerful owl, lingered too long taking photos of unusual fungi.

I think I'm in love with the romanticism of hiking than the act of it. Like all physical pursuits for me, it takes motivation the likes I don't have on tap. Honestly, I would love to walk the Camino across parts of Spain, and I'm sure if you're someone who's hiked with me before, you wouldn't be signing up to be my travel buddy on reading that. It's so far, taken me to places I would never have expected to think about two decades ago, including volcanoes in New Zealand, the bottom of the Grose Valley, Carnarvon Gorge, the Pyrenees, Tuscany, the south of Tassie, all around Lamington NP, the Cotswolds. I say: Bring on Scotland in winter.