26 February 2026

Two hundred days of a twenty-minute walk, and the three times it broke

The walk is the only habit on my sheet that has survived four years without being rewritten. It is twenty minutes, after lunch, the same loop, and its entire design principle is that it is too small to negotiate with.

The breaks

Three gaps of more than two days since the streak began. All three share a circumstance, which I did not spot until I put them in a table.

Gap	Length	What was happening
Late April	6 days	Away, staying with family
August	4 days	Away, a conference
Boxing Day onward	9 days	Away, staying with family

Every break was a change of location. Not illness, not weather, not workload — all three of which I had assumed were the risks, and all three of which the walk has survived repeatedly. What kills it is not being at home, because the habit is attached to a route rather than to a time.

What I changed

Nothing about willpower. I wrote down, in the sheet itself, a substitute for each place I regularly stay: a specific twenty-minute loop from each front door. Two of them I have now walked enough times to know without the note.

The bit that is not measurable

I cannot tell you the walk has done anything for my health, and I have no way to find out. What I can say is that it is the reliable break in a working day that is otherwise a single block, and that on the four-day gaps the afternoons were noticeably worse in a way I wrote down at the time without connecting it to anything.

Year	Days walked	Longest run
First year	212	41 days
Second year	276	96 days
Third year	301	134 days
Current	200 and counting	200 days