I’ve been thinking about how often walking is measured by what we overcome. It’s there in the particular language that follows us into the hills.

Highest.

Longest.

Hardest.

Completed.

Ticked off.

It’s a language borrowed from attainment. Don’t get me wrong, achieving your longest hike, or ‘bagging’ another peak is a wonderful thing but this way of pushing ourselves has quietly shaped how many of us think a walk should look. As if we need justification for a ramble through the landscape. Even the word ‘rambling’ has fallen out of fashion. 

I often envy the literal rise of hiking influencers I see on my social feed. I’m awed at the places they’re going, the achievements they’re making, and I notice that comparison creeping into my own thinking. I worry that I haven't climbed the highest hills, or got the latest gear. 

It’s made me realise how easily my own walking can start to turn into a performance, something to measure or compare, rather than something to experience.

Not everyone can climb the highest peaks. Not everyone wants to. And that does not make a person any less of a hiker. 

I’ve thought about that whilst walking. Some of the most important walks I’ve taken have involved turning away from the obvious goal rather than reaching it (and not always by choice).

On Tryfan, Pika (the dog) and I had to turn back. 

I guess it felt that way because I was carrying more than a backpack, I was carrying the weight of all those expectations about summits and completion. But what followed was not loss. It was a different route, a different rhythm, and a view that could only be seen because we had stepped away from the original plan. 

At Lud’s Church, the experience was almost the opposite. I’d made the conscious decision to avoid the peak of the nearby Roaches, so there was no summit to abandon, no metric to challenge. Instead, this hike told the story of a small group of friends rambling through the landscape; chatting, laughing and not really chasing anything at all (well, perhaps a pint at the local brewery). 

When I think back on that day, what lingers is not distance or effort, but a brief and generous dislocation from the ‘real world’. A reminder that walking can be less about advancing forward or upwards and more about stepping outside yourself.

These experiences have made me question what we mean when we say a walk “counts”. Does a walk only count if it reaches a summit, or proves endurance, or earns a statistic? Many of the walks that have mattered most to me wouldn’t qualify by those measures at all. 

They didn’t go very high.

They didn’t follow the “best” route.

Some of them barely went anywhere.

But they changed something.

I’m not saying let’s get rid of summit bagging or Strava badges, but I’m hoping we can start to acknowledge and value the routes which are not measured in elevation, but in exploration. Not in how far we climb, but in how much we notice. Not in what we overcome, but in what we allow to shift.