Jill Thomas is a Rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who believes life takes her where she needs to go, no matter the roundabout path.
For me, there is an anatomy to a solo Ramble. I can measure the unwinding of my brain by the kilometre.
For the first kilometre, my brain remains tangled up in whatever I was doing that day—finishing conversations, solving problems, composing emails—and I often feel mildly vexed by whatever hassle the day served up.
Then somewhere around the end of kilometre one, something shifts. My breathing slows, and my brain starts to wander wherever it feels like going. Kilometres two and three of my daily Rambles are where some of my best ideas live. Problems that seemed intractable an hour earlier develop little cracks where an answer can get in. I often find myself writing stories in my mind and stopping to record an idea on my phone.
By kilometre three, I arrive where my feet have been all along - in the right here right now, even if for just fleeting moments at a time. In those moments I notice the yellow evening light casting shadows through the trees or a little bit of trail magic tucked into someone’s garden and my mood lifts. By kilometre five, something else settles in, a kind of contentment, nestled onto a little soft pad of grateful.
The funny thing is, knowing how good a walk feels doesn't make getting out the door any easier. At the end of the workday, I have a hard time closing my laptop because stopping one kind of thing and starting another makes me grumpy. My brain prefers to keep doing whatever it is already doing forever.
There is a word for this: inertia which means object in motion tends to stay in motion.
So one of the best things I can do to overcome the inertia of getting out of the chair and going for a walk is not give myself time to negotiate. Close the laptop, put on my shoes, and walk out the door. It doesn’t need to be heroic. I just need to break the inertia.
I was thinking about all of this while Jane Witherspoon (my friend and Sole Sister Ramblers co-founder) were developing our new Daily Habit Challenge. Habits are a subject close to my heart because, in a funny way, a habit is where Sole Sister Ramblers began.
Near the end of the pandemic, I spent a month in Panama with Jane and I went out with her hiking group and had a rather unpleasant realization that I was out of shape.
For most of my adult life, I had jogged a couple of times a week but somewhere along the way, I had mostly stopped without admitted it to myself. The truth was that jogging wasn’t much fun anymore because it was starting to make various parts of my body hurt.
Jane and I walked a lot during my month in Panama—along the beach and around her little town—and I started to feel noticeably stronger. By the time I left, I was convinced that walking needed to become a regular habit.
After I went home, Jane and I signed up for an online walking challenge. We walked together virtually, posting our miles and pictures in a Messenger chat we nicknamed Sole Sister Ramblers. We LOVED it, so we invited some friends to join us, and our little group grew.
Before long, 35 women were in that chat, many from completely different parts of my life who had never met before. And there they were, getting to know each other and becoming friends in their own right.
That simple little Messenger chat was pure joy. There was something unexpectedly wonderful about seeing where everyone had walked that day, sharing a picture or a little story, and cheering each other on while talking about chin hairs and the other challenges of being a woman in her mid-fifties.
Walking didn’t just make us fitter; it deepened lifelong friendships and created new ones. And sharing my daily walk felt so good that it gave me another reason to actually get out there and do it. That little reward helped the habit take hold.
Five years later, that Messenger chat has grown into a Facebook group of almost 40,000 women, with another 31,000 women connecting in Sole Circles, making Rambling more fun for one another. And my own walking habit has grown right alongside it.
I still have to drag myself out the door kicking and screaming some days, trick myself on others, and bribe myself always.
But somewhere along the way, walking became more than something I was trying to make myself do. It became a BIG part of my identity.
There was no beautiful straight line from “I should walk more” to “I am a Rambler.” I went from two walks a week to three, back to two, back to three, missed entire weeks, and kept starting again. But eventually I became a Rambler.
Five years later, I have established a fairly reliable habit of four Rambles a week, and it has been life-changing. It’s a habit that has carried me through three Caminos, including 850 kilometres across Spain last spring, and has made me feel less fearful of the physical challenges that will inevitably come with getting older.
Before Panama, going for a walk alone to nowhere in particular was not something I would do. Now it is one of the most important parts of who I am, one of the things I am most proud of—and one of the great pleasures of my life.
The more I learn about aging, the more convinced I am that walking is one of the greatest gifts we can give our future selves. It helps us hold onto our strength, mobility, independence, and confidence in our bodies. So for me, every Ramble feels a little bit like putting something in the bank for the older woman I am becoming.
But walking has also given me things I never expected when I first decided I should get more exercise. There is room in walking for conversation, curiosity and exploration. You can stop to look at something, take a picture, change direction or sit on a bench. You move slowly enough to actually see where you are.
And all of that pleasure, I now understand, is part of why the habit has lasted.
I am not just walking because it is good for me anymore. I am a Rambler because I genuinely love to Ramble.
I was a jogger because I didn’t hate it.
I am proud of my fairly reliable four-Rambles-a-week habit. Four has changed my body, introduced me to places I would never otherwise have seen, and connected all of us here in Sole Sister Ramblers.
But I also know there is more benefit waiting for me if I can nudge that habit closer to almost every day.
I became curious: What is the missing puzzle piece between a four-day and a seven-day habit?
So I did what I tend to do when I become curious about something: I went down a rabbit hole. I read—or listened to—three books, listened to dozens of podcasts, took 56 pages of notes, and Jane and I eventually turned what we learned into a month of practical habit-building prompts for our new Daily Habit Challenge.
And one of the biggest things I learned was also, in retrospect, blindingly obvious:
Habits don’t grow from willpower.
Behaviour science has taught us that relying on willpower is a pretty lousy strategy for changing our behaviour. And of course it is. The evidence is all around us. I am a smart, capable, confident woman, and if willpower were enough, I would be thin.
We’d all be thin, wouldn’t we? If willpower worked, I would have quit smoking at 30 instead of 45. There are so, so, so many things in my life I would have started doing sooner, stopped doing sooner, or done differently if simply wanting something badly enough were the answer.
Another thing I learned—or perhaps finally admitted—is that consistency matters far more than difficulty. I have five years of Rambling to prove it. Four ordinary walks most weeks have done far more for me than occasional heroic bursts of exercise ever did.
What surprised me most was how many small, almost ridiculously easy things we can do to make a habit more likely to stick: changing our environment, attaching a new behaviour to something we already do, making the first step easier, creating an immediate reward, and having a plan for when we inevitably miss a day.
None of it is particularly dramatic—which may be exactly why it works.
I came away from my habit research with a little toolkit of things I am now experimenting with, and I genuinely think they might help me move my four-Rambles-a-week habit closer to seven. Not perfectly seven, because I have also learned that perfection is one of the absolute enemies of building a lasting habit.
And the research has made me look differently at my grumpy first kilometre.
I have always thought my problem at the end of the day was convincing myself to go for a walk. But I already want to walk. I know I will enjoy it. I have five years of evidence.
The walk isn’t the problem. The transition is.
That first kilometre isn’t proof that I don’t feel like Rambling. It is simply the distance my brain needs to travel from one state to another. Maybe I don’t need to wait for that slightly irritated woman to feel motivated. Maybe I just need to put her shoes on and take her with me.
Somewhere around kilometre three, she always disappears.
So if there is something you have been trying to start, something you would love to do more consistently, or perhaps a habit that once served you but no longer does, I hope you’ll join us in our Daily Habit Challenge.
The Daily Habit Challenge is about how small things, done consistently over time, can grow into something much bigger than they looked at the beginning.
A walking habit did that for me. And, come to think of it, it did that for Sole Sister Ramblers too.
READ MORE > JT's Tales From The Trail, Rambler Cafe Blog
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