Trooping Through Winter

Despite going to college in Vermont, I hate the winter, a hate that’s only grown in the 28 years since I settled in New York City. Which might be a welcoming  wonderland under the festive glow of holiday lights but immediately transitions to a frigid urban tundra as soon as the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. Nothing says the fun is over better than stacks of dead Christmas trees lining the sidewalk. In the grey, dismal days of January, it’s easy to hibernate at home.

Enter the Storm Trooper Challenge.

Or at least, that’s what it used to be called. I first heard about the challenge from one of my good friends, who got it from one of her good friends, who is a trainer and co-founded the initiative with two others in an effort to simultaneously get people outdoors and build community. It started as a real workout competition with many different levels, a cell phone app, a tracking leaderboard, and actual prizes. But for me and my friend and our rotating crew of fellow Troopers, the challenge has evolved over the years into one simple requirement: you must walk one mile outside every day during the month of January.

On first impression, it sounds quite easy. A mile? That’s nothing, especially for us stalwart city dwellers; we walk a mile outside just commuting to work! But as it turns out, the challenge can be quite difficult. At various times, many participants have lived in the suburbs, so they’re driving everywhere, not walking. And in our post-Covid, hybrid-work world, even those of us who live in a city might not be commuting every day, which means we have to force ourselves to go beyond the corner deli or local drugstore. Add in variable (often terrible) weather and widespread colds and flu and doing anything outside every day during the first month of the year becomes fairly daunting.

There’s nothing novel about a January challenge. We all know about Dry January and Whole30. Somehow we as a society seem to have settled into the idea that in order to make our unrealistic New Year’s resolutions “stick,” we should make the worst month of the year as unpleasant as possible. Those who like a nice glass of wine with dinner get to face the January doldrums sober. And those of us Troopers who like to stay inside during the winter months get to experience the great outdoors at least once a day no matter how big the blizzard or frigid the temperatures.

This year has been tougher than usual. Because after a long stretch of good luck, New York is currently enduring an old-fashioned horrible winter, complete with bitter cold and lots of snow that never melts. Our new mayor is learning the hard lesson that no matter how many cheery videos he posts and no matter how well the first day of plowing goes, New Yorkers will be rightfully annoyed when despite ongoing efforts by the Sanitation Department and others, more than a full week after the storm, people are still climbing icy mountains to access bus stops and subway entrances and, if cleared at all, many crosswalks have a path only six-inches wide, making it almost impossible for anyone with mobility challenges or a stroller to get around. (Much of the country is facing the same. MIAMI hit 35 degrees this weekend, and parts of the Carolinas got a foot of snow!)

In that regard, I’m quite lucky. We live very close to a Brooklyn public school that has a remarkable cleanup team. One day after any storm, the sidewalks around the school are pristine, shoveled and scraped down to bare concrete, not an ice patch in sight. So, although it can be tedious, when conditions are really bad, I can walk the three sides of the school over and over until I reach the required mile.

And yet.

Mild winter or bad, by early February (or sooner, if I’m being honest), I yearn for the challenge to be over even though the distance isn’t onerous, and the walks are often quite nice, especially when I drag friends around the school with me or I’m listening to a good book or the sun is particularly bright. The positive mental health benefits of forcing yourself to spend time outdoors at this time of the year have turned out to be very real, for me at least. And those positive feelings usually carry me through a walk on February 1st, when the thrill of having fulfilled my commitment creates a false sense of indestructibility, which is only exacerbated by our leader’s inevitable exhortation to “KEEP THIS THING GOING!”

Then February 2 hits.

Today.

When I have to decide whether I really will keep this thing going no matter what the groundhogs tell us.

Of course, compared to everything else going on in the world, none of this matters all that much. Among other things, I’m not marching in subzero temperatures in Minneapolis to protest murderous, unaccountable ICE agents. And even at the purely personal level, whatever benefits I might gain from being a Storm Trooper, a daily one-mile walk outside in January won’t magically change anyone’s life. Still, the walks offer a small positive spark during a dark month in the midst of a very dark time in the world. For me, the point of the challenge isn’t to create a forever “habit” in the manner of James Clear’s famous Atomic Habits book. The point is to push myself out of my (literal) comfort zone and do something semi-difficult for a semi-long time just to know that I can. Because no matter what your age, it can become all too easy to plant yourself in that comfort zone, stick with only what you know you like, and avoid all the hard-ish things.

So, I probably will get out there today. There will come a time (probably very soon) when I don’t do the walk every single day. But with New York on track to reach the balmy low 30s this afternoon, at the moment it appears I have no good reason to stop.

Unless you take into consideration the wind chill factor . . .