How Much Is Enough?

So much for my ‘outdoorsy’ identity — I live my life no more in nature than the common or garden office worker

Mar 16, 2024

Happy Friday!

For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋

My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor and cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel. In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.

Apologies for the late running of this service: twas a conspiracy of stuttering Substack servers and a somnificent sleep schedule.

But we're all here now, so welcome to edition 393.

How Much Outdoors Is Enough?

During my February writing sabbatical, I read Local, Alastair Humphreys’ marvellous new book about the year he spent exploring a single 20x20km map centred (more or less) on his quiet suburban family home.

This isn’t a book review (just buy it), but I have one little warning for readers: be extremely careful opening Local because a million fascinating, horrifying and/or whimsical things will tumble out of its pages and directly into your brain.

One such was 1000 Hours Outside, a project to encourage people, especially families with children, to spend at least a thousand hours outside (duh) during the year.

As someone who likes to think of themselves as outdoorsy, and who certainly thinks of themselves as data-sy, my interest was piqued.

Six weeks ago, I downloaded a time tracker to my phone and set about recording how many hours I spent outdoors every day. (Approximately, people. Let’s not get silly about this.)

Here’s my record for each of those six weeks:

Looking back, I wince when I see how little time I spend outdoors on a typical day: 40 to 100 minutes. On weekends or days off, I might get out a touch more, which explains why my daily average hovers around 90 minutes.

That’s six percent of my life. Ouch.

Still more painful for my adventurous ego is the discovery that these kinds of stats are no more than the rank average.

A 2018 Public Health England study found that 894 office workers in the UK spent an average of 70 minutes outdoors on work days and 150 minutes outdoors on the weekend (in spring and summer, at least).

So much for my ‘outdoorsy’ identity — I live my life no more in nature than the common or garden office worker.

It made me wonder: how much time outdoors is enough? Are there days when I feel brighter, happier, stronger? Is that correlated with time spent outdoors?

Henry David Thoreau — the undisputed authority for all self-respecting nature writers of the modern day, for he has something definitive to declare on every conceivable topic — pronounces the following:

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
Henry David Thoreau, Walking

Four hours a day — sauntering! This certainly sounds like a luxury, but who are we to argue? We, who are, as a species, so thoroughly addicted to the indoors and, even there, to the confines of our screens?

Who among us really knows what it feels like to spend such time outdoors every day, in the Thoreauvian fashion? How could we possibly know?

And — more tantalising — what might happen to us if we tried to find out?

Well, today is only Friday and this is what’s happened to my time spent outdoors chart:

Yes! It's that time of year when I don my waterproofs and squelch out into the mud to initiate schoolkids into the mysterious arts of navigation, campcraft and how to cross a field without disturbing the builders (thanks HS2).

I’ve spent more time outdoors in the last three days than I did in the previous two weeks put together. I’ve had a glimpse of the Thoreauvian life and I LIKE it.

The nation’s ‘health and spirits’ aren’t at their apogee right now. Could it do us any harm to spend more of our time — maybe this time right now — out of doors? (Ideally sauntering, but I’d take a park bench.)

We are fast approaching British Summer Time, when our cherished evenings stretch their paws to the solstice. When better to set a course for long hours in nature? (Such as we have available.)

Here are some ideas for how we might do more of our indoors stuff outdoors:

Pack up your dinner and take it outside for a picnic. Bonus points if you snag one of the increasing numbers of public gas-fired BBQs (try the park or beach).
Office workers: take your laptop outside. Bonus points if you build your own tree-desk like I did during lockdown (extra bonus points if you ever actually use it… 🙄)
Don’t travel so much inside a moving object. Probably don’t try train surfing, but any moment you can convert from inside to outside is surely worth a punt.
Cars are tricky, but you could try parking further away, near the park, perhaps. Trains and buses are more flexible: switch stops and divert your legs or wheels through some green or blue.

Let me know how you get on. (And whether you want to buy a tree-desk, one careful owner…)

Still from video courtesy of the Associated Press

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