Walking in Hard Weather
The Heron Did Not Read the Forecast
There is a particular kind of February morning when the rain is moving sideways and the wind has decided to have its way with whatever it can find, and you stand at the kitchen window watching the trees bend low and a small, mean voice inside you says, today we are not going. That voice is wrong almost every single time, and I have come to love how reliably it is wrong.
Last February, on a morning very much like that one, I walked the marsh edge at Plum Island with the sleet moving sideways like it had somewhere important to be, and there she was. A heron. One leg tucked up under her body, the other planted in two inches of frozen muck, calm as anything I have ever seen. I stopped. I watched her for a long time. There was nowhere else I needed to be in that minute, and she clearly felt the same way about her own life. We were two creatures keeping company in weather that had emptied the world of everyone else, and I cannot tell you how full and quietly joyful that felt.
This is the secret, I think, of walking in the hard weather. The world becomes yours. The road, the river, the marsh, the wet leaves underfoot, the gulls scattered like punctuation across a grey sky, the smell of bark turned almost sweet by rain, the slow turning of your own warm body inside three layers of wool. All of it is yours, in the only sense that anything is ever yours, which is that you happen to be present for it.
People ask me how I keep walking when the weather is doing its worst, and the truth is that the weather is rarely doing its worst. The forecast app is doing its worst. The forecast is engineered to make you feel responsible for staying put. Open the actual door. Smell the actual air. The world out there is almost always more inviting than the picture of it, and the picture of it is what keeps most people inside.
A few practical love letters from one walker to another, because if you are going to choose this thing, you may as well be warm and dry while you do it:
Cotton is the wrong choice. It holds water against your skin and gives it back to your body for hours after you come home. Wool, especially merino, keeps warming you even when it is soaked through. That is the difference, and it is a big one.
Three layers is the whole system. A merino base layer next to your skin, which pulls moisture away from your body. A middle layer that traps warm air, like fleece or a light puffy. A waterproof shell with taped seams over the top of both. Once you have those three things, the cold mostly stops being a problem. The Norwegians, who walk through nine months of bad weather a year, have a saying. There is no bad weather, only bad clothing. They are right.
The single best thing I have learned, in all the years I have been MorningWalking through whatever weather decided to show up that day, is to walk into the wind first. Whichever direction the wind is coming from, head that way out the door, and come home with the wind at your back, pushing you the last mile like an invisible kindness. It took me five years to figure this out, and I would like to spare you those five years.
Eat something before you go out in real cold. A piece of toast with butter, a spoonful of yogurt with honey, a handful of almonds, anything at all. Cold and an empty stomach together create a kind of cold the body cannot quite bargain its way out of, and the fix is so simple and so kind that it feels almost embarrassing to mention. A few bites of food is the difference between a glorious hour outside and a miserable one.
Microspikes live by my door from November all the way through March. Twenty dollars buys you a pair of small rubber-and-metal cages that slip over your shoes, and they are the cheapest insurance a walker will ever own. The most common winter walking injury is not anything dramatic out on a trail. It is a slip on the driveway, three feet from a person's own kitchen door. Falls break wrists and tailbones, and worse, they break walking habits, which take years to build and a single morning to lose.
The science of all this is so quietly wonderful that I want to tell you about it for a moment. In 2015, a Stanford researcher named Gregory Bratman ran a study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which he sent one group of people on a 90-minute walk outdoors in nature, and a matched group on an indoor treadmill for the same length of time. He scanned everyone's brains afterward. The outdoor walk quieted the part of the brain that ruminates, the part that loops on the same anxious thought again and again, while the treadmill walk did almost nothing for it. Nobody entirely understands what the outdoors is doing to us. We only know that it is doing something we cannot reproduce inside, no matter how good the lighting is.
Then there is the light itself, which is one of the most underappreciated forms of medicine on this planet. Your eyes register brightness in a unit called “lux.” A pleasant bedside lamp puts out around fifty lux. A grey January morning, the kind that does not even look like daylight from inside, is pouring thousands of lux into your retinas every minute you are out in it. An overcast sky is more light than every bulb in your house combined, and your circadian rhythm, that beautiful inner clock that decides when you sleep, when you wake, whether you feel like yourself or like an unfinished problem, runs entirely on outdoor light. In winter, it is starving for you. Twenty minutes outside before noon is a real and honest intervention, and the price of admission is a pair of slippers and a willingness to be slightly uncomfortable for a little while.
A handful of smaller things, the kinds of things you only learn from walking through a lot of bad weather, that I do not see written down anywhere:
Breathe through your nose. The nose is a quiet genius of an organ. It warms and humidifies cold air before it ever reaches the delicate tissues of your lungs, which is why three miles of mouth-breathing in winter air leaves your chest feeling scratched and slightly broken in a way that has nothing to do with the walking and everything to do with the air. Closed mouth, open nose. The whole walk feels different.
A thin layer of plain petroleum jelly on the cheeks and the bridge of the nose on a really cold morning prevents windburn. It looks absurd. I do not care. I am over fifty, walking before sunrise, and the only ones who see me are the herons.
A buff or a bandana pulled up over the nose and mouth in real wind. Your own warm breath collects inside the fabric and becomes a portable heater for your face. This is one of those tiny adjustments that changes the entire experience.
Lay everything out the night before. Shoes by the door, jacket on the hook, hat tucked into a sleeve, gloves in the pockets where you will find them. This is not a discipline thing; it is a kindness from your evening self to your dawn self, because at 5:50 am you will not be the woman you were last night, and the 5:50 am woman needs help finding her own gloves.
You come home a slightly different person, every single time, and the difference accumulates. You come home with your face pink and a little wild, your hair stuck flat to your forehead, your fingers tingling back to life, your boots leaving puddles on the floor. You come home, and the warmth of the house hits your skin like a held breath finally let out. You make yourself a pot of tea. You stand at the window for a moment and look back out at the very weather you just walked through, and somehow it looks different now, almost friendly, because you and it have an understanding now that the people still inside do not have.
That is not nothing. That is the joyful disobedience of walking in weather that asks you not to. That is choosing, fifty-six times, to be the kind of woman who steps out into the rain and finds a heron there waiting.
Libby DeLana is an executive creative director with an explorer’s heart. She writes about walking, cold water, and the small rituals that make a life feel awake. Her books, Do Walk and Cold Joy, are companions for anyone who likes a little adventure in their days. You can find her on Instagram @thismorningwalk, @thiscoldjoy, and @parkhere. You can find Cold Joy at thiscoldjoy.com.