Walk to Work Week

13 May 2015

This week is Living Streets’ annual event: Walk to Work Week. It is something that we, as a company, really enjoyed last year and that I personally have been looking forward to ever since.

As it falls in the run up to our big Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge, everyone is finding different ways to get involved. We’ve got some people planning putting in some serious time before and after the work day, while others who live a bit further away are thinking about taking smaller/shorter walks during their breaks. All and all, it’s going to be a very active office this week.

One of the things that is great about Walk to Work Week, besides the competition it always fosters, is the general mood lift in the office. Living Streets have some great information on their site about how beneficial walking is for your body and mind , something we have certainly noticed this week.

Just this morning, in fact, seven of us got up extra early to walk 4 miles along the Coast to Coast trail, it was beautiful.

This year, they’re also running a bit of an odd, but fun Twitter campaign to get people to tweet pictures of interesting things they find on their walks. The catch? You have to include your feet in the picture, they’re calling it a “welfie.” I wasn’t so sure about it, but people really seem to have embraced this one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many pictures of shoes, wellies, sandals, and even some bare feet with blisters that we had to ban for being too…well…blistery.

We’re even going to use W2WW as a way of getting to know our new developer who joined this week and another who is joining us next week. The plan is for us all to walk up to a local pub for a group meal later this week—a great way to welcome a new starter to the team.

All in all, I think this week of walking to work is shaping up to be a great way of getting people involved in a bit of exercise and helping to train them up for the big Y3P push…it’s really a win-win.