Walk Therapy
The Cardio Confessional
Laura Finney
7/23/2026
I’ve never met a problem that didn’t seem slightly smaller thanks to a walk.
In Maryland, I usually walk with my neighbor. If you happened upon us charging down our country lane, you'd assume she was trying to get away from me. She moves at roughly the speed of light, and I'm fairly certain if I tripped and fell, she'd never even glance back. Not because she's heartless, but because slowing down would interfere with whatever Olympic qualifying event she's apparently convinced she's in.
We cover about five miles a day, which is enough time to know an alarming amount about each other's lives. I know why her dog has trust issues, she knows why mine is on a chicken detox, and between us we've solved absolutely none of our actual problems.
Here's the strange part: I'm not sure I'd recognize her if she walked into my house.
I spend most of our walks a half-step behind her, trying to keep up. If there were a police lineup consisting solely of the backs of women's calves, I'd identify hers in a heartbeat. Face? Fifty-fifty.
That's the peculiar thing about walking side by side—or in our case, slightly staggered. You almost never look at each other. You're both looking ahead. There's no pressure to maintain eye contact, no need to decode someone's expression or wonder whether you've said too much. Strangely, that's exactly what allows you to say more.
As I’ve mentioned before, for roughly half the year I’m on Martha's Vineyard, where walking is less of a scheduled activity and more of a migratory pattern. Whereas in Maryland, it is mostly just the two of us, the gazelle and I, on the Vineyard it’s practically a team sport.
Most mornings I head out alone with the dog, fully intending to help him walk off the turkey dinner he was slipped the night before. Within ten minutes I've merged into a loose formation of women doing the same thing. Living on a one-mile loop makes our walks feel less like a scheduled outing and more like a murmuration. Women drift in and out, conversations split and merge, and no one ever seems to arrive or leave—they simply become part of the flock for a while.
One friend offers that the in-laws are coming and would it be in poor taste to start drinking at breakfast? Another suggests slipping them a sleeping pill at lunch. That’s the beauty of it. Nobody asks for the back-story. We just keep moving at a brisk clip, tossing pieces of our lives over our shoulders into the morning air.
By the time we hit the five-mile mark and the flock naturally begins to scatter, we haven’t solved any problems. But my dog is tired, my shoulders have relaxed, and the weight I carried out the door feels roughly five miles lighter.
During Covid I would occasionally walk with a friend on the island whose husband had recently left her. It was a devastating story told over approximately six million miles of dirt road. It was heartbreaking. I did, naturally, offer to help him meet his maker. After all, I was not raised by wolves.
We walked shoulder to shoulder through some of the prettiest scenery on earth while she unpacked the collapse of her marriage. It was an odd juxtaposition. Ospreys soaring overhead. Sunlight dancing across the stony shore. Me mentally pricing shovels.
Years later, reading her amazing book on the subject, I realized something I'd never considered. Even after all those miles, I hadn't known the whole story. Which makes me wonder, do we ever share the whole story?
Lord knows I don't.
And you’re welcome!
I sometimes wonder if, were my friends to see the absolute circus taking place in my brain, they'd run for cover or simply wander in with their own juggling elephants. Hard to say.
But tomorrow I'll put on my sneakers and the dog and I will head out to walk off our turkey and angst. We'll hit the loop because it's the quickest way to pick up four thousand of our closest friends and catch up on the latest. We'll vent. We'll overshare. We'll carefully avoid total transparency. We'll laugh far more than the material warrants.
Then we'll head home to our beautifully messy, wonderfully unfinished lives. And tomorrow morning we'll lace up once again and pretend we're just out walking the dog.