386 Heather Waring ~ Walking for Personal Development and Self Care

Transcript

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 386. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another exciting guest.

This week I am sharing with you my conversation with Heather Waring. Heather is a person that I know from real life as we are both based near London. This is one of those episodes where I could have kept talking all day long because we are both huge fans of long distance walking!!

Heather has a mission to get one million women walking and this drives everything she does with her business. I absolutely love how she is getting out there and helping women to start the life-changing journey of walking. Today, we are going to talk about walking for personal development and self-care.

So who is Heather? Heather is a walk leader and Camino expert. She is a transformational coach, author and speaker. Her mission is to impact the lives of women through the simple activity of walking. She creates space for women to rediscover and reconnect with their true self and re-ignite that spark and essence that has gotten lost along life’s path. Whether walking virtually or in person Heather taps into the energy, wisdom and stories of those who have gone before and uses these experiences and learnings in her work with her clients bringing forth their own stories.

Today you are going to learn: What was it like to walk the Camino de Santiago starting from the middle of France — a lot of people start their Camino journey at the border, very near the border between France and Spain, Heather started from the middle of Franc, so what was that like? We talk about how Heather found herself walking the Great Wall of China, quite unexpectedly. We talk about how Heather used walking to recover from burnout and adrenal fatigue. We discussed how Heather turned walking into a business and how she is using that business to fulfil her goal to get one million women walking. I really hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did, it was just a great conversation and so much of what Heather was saying was stuff that I could have said myself, we are aligned in how we view walking and how walking has changed our lives. So here is the episode.

Holly: Good morning Heather!

Heather: Good morning Holly!

Holly: How are you doing today?

Heather: I am great thank you and the sun is shining a little, so that is always a nice sign.

Holly: It is! It might only last for a few minutes but it is always nice to see it! {laughing}

Heather: It is out there somewhere!

Holly: So we are here to talk about your outdoor adventures and your walking. So let’s get started by talking about, what’s your outdoor adventure of choice?

Heather: It is always some kind of long distance path or part of a long distance path because, as we know, many of them are very long. I just love the idea of starting in a morning and walking for a day and then getting up the next morning and taking that a little bit further and a little bit further. And I do that as part of my own personal walking experience. I chose to do the Camino Portugese from Porto last summer, which was over 13 days. So that was a prime example of a lovely kind of outdoor adventure for me.

Holly: I was planning to do that this year and then Covid struck! I had everything booked for March, I had my flights and it was just as Covid was getting to the next level and the morning of my flight I was still planning to go and then I thought, ‘maybe I should check the internet again!’ {laughing} …and I ended up not going. So I am really excited to hear about that, what was that like?

Heather: It was beautiful, I chose to do the coastal route and actually in Portugal they have this coastal route: they have the interior route, they have the coastal route and then they have this other route and it is called ‘the Litoral’, I don’t know if it translates like this but it is literally walking along beaches and the dunes. If you walk like I do there is nothing worse than walking on sand, you know?, and when I first heard about this I thought, ‘hmm’. But what they have cleverly done, is they have put in these wonderful board walks, right along the top of the dunes, so you get to walk as if you are actually in the dunes on the beach but you are not having to wade through that horrendous sand, which just takes all your energy away. I didn’t really know Portugal at all, that part up from Porto is just gorgeous and the beaches are stunning, even when you get into Spain the beaches are stunning. What are you going to do, the internal or the coastal one?

Holly: Well, I write a book every time I walk a trail, so I was thinking the great thing about this Camino is that you can do three different versions of it and I could compare them all. So I thought I was going to start out with the central one and then do the coastal one another year but we will see, we will see what happens when I finally get around to doing it!

Heather: Yeah just a little word of warning for the year coming up, I don’t know if you are aware but it is holy year, it is not going to be a typical year because we have Coronavirus and I have taken on extra info this year just generally about how busy it gets, because I have been told that it gets phenomenally busy with people coming in coach-loads and buses and cars and bikes and walking and running and horse back and everything. And I know for me taking my clients I don’t want them to have that experience you know, so I just say that so you are aware, at the end of the day it is up to you.

Holly: Yeah, I want no part of that! When I realised that I couldn’t go this year I said, ‘bumping that to 2022 or beyond, but it is definitely not happening next year’. Let me ask you a question though, I am so used to walking here in England where the trails are fairly quiet, I know if you do the South Downs Way in the summer you will see other people, but you can also go for hours on end without seeing other people. So how did the Camino compare to that? Because I really like being alone on a trail and I am not sure if I am going to be comfortable with the really social aspect of the Camino.

Heather: I think it depends how much you want to do it. There are some people who know they will never do all the Camino so they want to do the last bit into Santiago so they can get their Compostela, their certificate. That bit is busy. It doesn’t mean that it can’t still be pleasurable, but it is busy. I will just share with you, I started my Camino journey actually in the middle of France, you can do it from three places in France, and I started from a place called Le-Puy-en-Velay, South of the Massif Central and the part in France (we must have done about five sections in France), I adore France for all the reasons that you are talking about, it is not busy, it is not commercialised, the path is very, very, well-marked, the food as you would expect is very good, some of the places you stay are wonderful, because I have to admit I am not a hostel person. It is just that I love the fact that it is quiet, and it is a bit of a shock when you leave that and come into Spain, because of course the beginning, of the Camino in Spain, and the end, are the busiest bits, but you very, very, rarely on your own (there are some bits that you are on your own) but it is definitely a busier path. If you go with that expectation and that knowledge, then I think you can build that in, but if you go not having thought about that, and you like to walk alone, it is a bit of a battle on your senses, you know?

Holly: I have actually read a book about a guy who ran the Camino from Le Puy, all the way to Santiago, and he said the same thing about France, he really, really, enjoyed the parts (he enjoyed the whole thing) but he had really great things to say about the section in France. So I think that is very, very, attractive and especially the food.

Heather: Oh yes, because I am looking actually, I want to do the 2021 Camino in Spain but I am looking to showcasing a section of the French one in the Autumn next year, because I think we will be able to that and I feel like it is part of my mission to show people the French bit, because everyone is so tunnel visioned into this Spanish bit you know and there is so much more beauty and solitude in the French bit.  

Holly: And do you speak French?

Heather: Petit peu!

Holly: Because I am fluent in Spanish but I don’t speak more than five words of French so I think that is one thing that would make me a little bit nervous about doing more of the French part.

Heather: I wouldn’t be too nervous! What I have discovered about the French and we used to have a house in Bergundy for a while, which didn’t help my French at all, is the fact that if you try they will then meet you. If you are one of these people who don’t even attempt, then they will kind of write you off. They want to see that you are willing to at least say, hello, goodbye, a cup of coffee, thank you, those kinds of things in their language, I didn’t have a problem at all.

Holly: Oh okay, that is good to hear. So you said that you are not a hostel person and neither am I. So that is another thing that I am really concerned about, I would kind of like to try, the albergues, the hostel experience, just to see what it is like, but I am not really looking forward to it. So where did you stay if you weren’t staying in the hostels?

Heather: We stayed in little pensions, and hotels. I did it with a company who organised everything and I use that company now when I take my women away because they tend to be women who have done the camping and the hosteling and everything years ago and don’t really want to do it anymore, they want a good night’s sleep, that kind of thing. There are some…I have seen into some of the hostels that look really lovely and definitely if you are walking on your own it is a great way to meet people. So I, open-minded, give it a go, know that you can always decide, ‘well tonight, I have had enough of hostels, I am going to go to a B&B or a hotel and then maybe I will give it another go later’. I think you can nowadays on the Camino choose to stay in different places. There are some beautiful hostels in beautifulAbbeys and places like that and I think the bigger ones, with the tales of huge big dormitories where they pack people in, I think there are less of those now than there were, there are more where you can have a room for a couple of people, or sometimes you can even get a room on your own in a hostel.

Holly: Oh okay, that is good to know. So what was it like booking through a company, because when you do that obviously you are locked into, ‘I have to stay here tonight, there tomorrow night’, and you don’t have that flexibility you have when you are playing it by ear every night. What was that like for you?

Heather: I think because I did it with a friend fo mine and the reason we started from the middle of France was because we couldn’t do it with our lifestyle at the time in one fell swoop, and so we knew we had to do it in sections. And so we decided to make it a longer walk then and we usually did about six or seven days walking at a time. So I guess that when you know that is your kind of limit it is possible to just do longer days perhaps and know that ‘I have only got five or six of these and then I am home can stop’. When you go off to do it all in one fell swap I think you kind of want that flexibility, because if something happens and your knee plays up and you get some blisters then you might decide, ‘hey I only want to do five or six miles today and rest up and I want to do that for a couple of days until I recover’, and you definitely don’t have that if you go with a company. The only way you can be flexible with a company is to decide, ‘right I am only going to do five or six miles and then I am going to get a taxi to the next bit and I will miss that bit out’, and that for most of us is not the purpose because we want to feel that we have walked it all.

Holly: Yeah, that makes sense.

Heather: Just to say for anybody listening, finding the right company is important and I tried a couple out and I work with a small family run company and we respect and we treat each other very well, because we like each other and they are always fabulous. As a result I have given them lots of business. I think finding the right people is good and I feedback to them loads, they know that if I feed back that something is not good, then it is not good. I am not one of those people…I am usually saying wonderful things and I have only ever had to complain I think about two hotels on the route, but they know the feedback I give them is good feedback.

Holly: Well because you have had so much experience, so they know that you have seen the variety of different places, and you really know when something is not right.

Heather: Yeah and I am looking at it from my own perspective but I am also looking at it from the possibility of taking others there, wanting others to have a good experience and that is why I won’t lead on a path that I haven’t done first.

Holly: Yeah absolutely, I absolutely agree with that! So how did you first get into walking?

Heather: I met a woman at university and we got on really well together, I went to university in Glasgow and she was a Scot and had been brought up walking and she introduced me to it. And as our friendship grew, we started to take more walking holidays and we would pack our cars with tents and go down to the West Country and we also did an amazing holiday in the States, flying into Las Vegas but going to the north and south routes of the canyon and going up to different parks in Utah and in Colorado and in Arizona and just having the most amazing time, after this I was pretty hooked really. Then, I was working for the British Heart Foundation and they were doing a walk along the Great Wall of China, they were one of the first charities to ever do these kind of charity trek things that brought in people that weren’t their normal sort of donators. Although I was working for them I really had always wanted to go to China and my husband finally said to me, and my daughter was only three at the time, he said, ‘for goodness sake, just go. It is not somewhere you are probably going to take Ellie at the moment’. And I thought: absolutely. And so I did it as a proper participant, I had to raise I think £2,000-£3,000 but I actually managed to raise £12,500, which was phenomenal – of course I reached out to all the people I worked for at the British Heart Foundation, they happily gave me money! That really got me into, my friend who lived in Glasgow, I was in London by this time, I would go up to the Lake District and she would drive and pick me up, I had talked her into coming with me. We would train one weekend a month in the Lakes and I remember being in Buttermere and looking up at the fells and thinking, ‘shit I will never manage that’, and then within a couple of months of just taking it gradually I was up there. I developed, I have to say it was a training plan I still used with my Camino people but I developed a training plan. No blisters, no problems, no aches and pains and it was fabulous. So that is how I got into it. Then I came back and knew I couldn’t spend quite so much time away from the family, but kept the walking going on a kind of lighter note and then started building it again when I built the business. I am very proud to say that I am the walking ambassador for my local children’s hospice and that is a great way for me/one of the ways that I give back, so I use my walking to help them as well.

Holly: So circling back to the Great Wall of China, I am so fascinated by that, because it just looks absolutely gorgeous. You know you have got the Apple TV screensaver that I always love when the Great Wall comes up on that, because it just looks so lush and green and beautiful, so what was it like to walk that?

Heather: Absolutely fascinating, it is a huge long wall, so we did five days and what happened was in most times we would be bussed out to it and then we would walk a day along it and then we would be bussed back to somewhere else and then the next day we would be taken to another section. There was one day where we stayed very close to the wall overnight and started where we had ended and did the second part. What I loved, my favourite section was the wildest bit, right along the Mongolia-China border and it hadn’t been refurbished so there were parts where it was tumbling down and you were kind of scrambling over the stones but these little turret outposts were still there and it was just, you could kind of imagine, if you shut your eyes, what it must have been like. In fact the wall in many parts, it was defended but there was never any need for it with hindsight so I think it must have been a very lonely place to be posted to. And then there was another bit where local farmers would come and we were only carrying our day packs and they wanted to help carry our day packs, they would earn a bit of money doing this. There we all were in our shorts and our walking boots and our walking poles and our backpacks and there they were in plimsolls and jeans and often a tailored jacket over a t-shirt, you know it was funny. They do that often at different times of the season when there is not a lot to do in the farm. We couldn’t really talk to them but it is amazing what communications you could make with your hands and nods and smiles. So that was good. My least favourite bit was the bit closet to Beijing which is where they take all the tourists for a day because it was so crowded and it was full of tourist shops. The interesting thing was, and I suppose this is us as tourist animals, which I kind of don’t do that often, as people would get off the coach and the car park they would walk to a bit of wall, they would look at it and that would be it and actually you just escaped five or ten minutes along the wall you were in peace and quiet and you would get a completely different aspect of this wall, you know. Absolutely fascinating, I loved it absolutely.

Holly: It sounds really exciting and just really lovely. I didn’t know you were allowed to walk along the crumbling bits, I wasn’t sure if you could walk the whole length of it or if those bits were closed off, so I think that is really interesting to know that you can.

Heather: Well you can on that bit, I don’t know about the other bits and I don’t know if it is possible to walk the whole length or whether there are bits that are so badly fallen into disrepair that perhaps you couldn’t walk along them, it would be interesting to see and how long it would take, I am not sure and of course where do you stay as well.

Holly: You would have to either camp, or I don’t know, it is so remote. Heather, what have you learned about yourself through all of these walking adventures, how have they changed your life?

Heather: In so many ways and on so many different levels. Walking definitely helped me through some of the darkest, darkest, times because I burnt out in 2014/2015, I then was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue, inside I had a number of years that I now call my ‘wilderness years’, when all this was building and I didn’t really know what was going on. So walking was the main tool that I used to come back from that. So my book is called ‘How Walking Saved My Life’, because it did. I guess what I learned about myself, I learned about my strength and my tenacity to get to the bottom of things and just to come out the other side. I learned very much about how we are just a very small part of the world or the planet and I remember sitting on top of a hill in the lakes or a fell in the lakes and having my coffee and sarnies and looking out and thinking: oh my god there is so much beauty here and it is so enormous, there are all these lakes and hills and colour and absolute fantasticness.  Here I am as this one small person (or two, with my friend) and sitting on top of this hill and actually what I am agonising about is so small in the great scheme of things and so relatively unimportant and that is something that I have never, ever, forgot and it really puts things into perspective. I think the other thing,, and this comes very much from the Camino aspect of walking, the simplicity of life, there is a real rhythm to walking, it is a beautiful rhythm, it makes meditative journing. The thing I love about long-distance paths, which is how we started, is that you get up in the morning, you have some breakfast, you set out on the path. All you have to do is get from where you are A, to where your destination is at the end of the day B, and then you have a shower, a meal, you go to bed, you get up the next day and you do it again. And when I go away walking like that it is such a…oh it is such a resetting, a recharging, and it is just an escape and it is wonderful, that as well is one of the big things that I will never forget and I really think I learned it through the walking and and of course my purpose in life, the clarification of my real purpose came out of my walking.

Holly: That whole last bit that you said, I could have said myself word for word. {laughing}

Heather: I can imagine!

Holly: It is just that I love the simplicity of walking a long-distance trail, as you said, it is just eat, sleep, walk and you don’t need anything else because it is all perfect.

Heather: Funny you say what you have just said because your book, If Only Trees Could Talk, when you brought that out it made me smile because in all the time when I have been walking, especially on the Camino, I would walk along parts of it thinking, because for me I loved walking ancient paths, because there are so many stories on ancient paths, and even when I am taking my women away we talk about ‘who do you think walked these paths before, and why do you think they were there and why do you think they were they there and what were they like and what were their stories?’, then we relate those to our own stories, the stories that we tell ourselves that are negative and the stories that we could be using that are positive. And I remember thinking often on the Camino: oh my God, if only these trees could talk, the stories they could tell!  So when you brought your book out, I remember thinking she is a lady totally on my wavelength!

Holly: {laughing} Maybe that should be a book, The Trees of the Camino.

Heather: Mainly oak trees as well.

Holly: Oh I love oak trees! So what are your favourite ancient paths to walk, because I think the most typical ancient path, I have walked has been the Ridgeway and I absolutely love the Ridgeway, I have done it twice now, I love all the ancient sites along it, what ancient paths do you like?

Heather: A couple of years ago I walked the St. Cuthbert’s Way, it starts in Scotland and then it goes up into the border into England and it ends in Lindisfarne, it is a beautiful walk, it is very wild in places, there is something very exciting about crossing the border, which I have crossed the border from England to Scotland many times, but never in the middle of Moorland over a stile! I got a real kick out of that! You are starting at the beautiful Melrose Abbey which is now a ruin of course, a little lovely border town in Scotland, and you are following the footsteps of this monk, Cuthbert, who walked to Lindisfarne. So you are very aware of following in the footsteps of, it is a very quiet walk and you don’t see that many other people and then you know you come down into the little border towns on the other side, with their stories of wool trade and things like that and then you end up walking along the sands following the pilgrim poles that were set there to make sure that people didn’t walk into the quick sands and drown, while the tide is out actually to the island of Lindisfarne, where there is Lindisfarne Abbey which is again beautiful to visit. There is something very magical about the island and especially when the tide comes in and then you are trapped there, except for me it never felt like being trapped it felt like just the privilege of being cut off from the rest of the country and on this lovely little island, so that is one of my favourites. And I have also been doing the Pilgrim’s Way over the past while, now some of it you will probably have walked, it follows the North Downs in some places, because I think the M25 took up some of it, it is a really old path and what frustrates me about the Pilgrims Way I am enjoying it, I am enjoying it lots but my frustration is around the fact that they talk about it as the UK alternative to the Camino, yet the infrastructure is pathetic. There are some signs of local walks and trails, and if you are a local person that is fine, but if you are trying to walk the Pilgrim’s Way, there is no, in most places there is no talking about it at all, even in Winchester and I asked the people ‘is there any signage?’ and the guy there said, ‘oh talk to me, no, it is terrible isn’t it!’. This is the major starting point of a major trek that takes you to Canterbury and then from there onto Rome and there is no signage. So when I do see a brick in the wall, not a brick a huge stone that goes back many years I take photographs, because ‘oh my God it is a proper sign!’, but I think that is a real shame because I think we need to do something in the UK about this and even from an economic perspective we are losing out, so I am reaching out to the Pilgrim’s Trust at the moment who have just produced the most beautiful new book that has just come out of all the British pilgrimages (I don’t think it covers Ireland), the most beautiful book Holly if you are interested in that kind of thing, I will find you the link and send it to you.

Holly: Oh thank you.

Heather: But I got it recently and I was drooling as I read it: I want to do that, I want to do that, and I want to do that! There are so many ancient paths in the UK. Actually some of the Drovers roads up in Scotland where people used to drive the cattle and the sheep to markets and things, they are fascinating.

Holly: Love it, love it, love it. So let’s circle back a little way to talk about your adrenal fatigue. How did walking help you to get through that, because I would have thought if you have got adrenal fatigue you would need to rest?

Heather: I think, well I don’t think, I know, it hits people in lots of different ways and manifests itself in different ways, one of the reasons it manifested with me before I even knew what it was, and that was the biggest signpost to adrenal fatigue, I had such aching legs and muscles and that was because I wasn’t getting enough magnesium and potassium and things like that which goes hand in hand with having adrenal fatigue, but as I say not for everyone, for someone else it might be something else. So that is what led a somatic educator, someone that I was working with to find out more and to get me to have blood tests and saliva tests and things like that. Whereas other people become totally exhausted, the next stage from adrenal fatigue and chronic fatigue, and there are about five levels of adrenal fatigue and I was on level four, second from the bottom, but I hadn’t got into that total exhaustion. So for me, although I didn’t have that much energy, I was still able to walk and I started walking slowly really and walking slowly close to home and only for a short period of time, but that was the biggest gift, really, because I couldn’t go out and do my ten miles, fifteen miles, I was at a slower pace taking much more notice of what was going on around me, I think that was the first thing and that really got me more into being in the moment, much more mindful of everything and much more able to see everything in nature and I am very lucky I live very close to Epping Forest so there are miles and miles of wonderful forest and even now, they joke with me that I can sport fungi miles away! It made me so much more aware, I just notice everything about nature nowadays and it does actually, I am just about to launch a new programme which is all about the seasons and how their energies effect us and that all comes from that. It also helped me, the slowness of pace and the fact that I was able to ponder things I wasn’t going out purposively to think but I find walking to be very creative. I get really good ideas when I walk and so I think in those earlier stages I was allowing some of my feelings to percolate and come up for me and sometimes sit and just think really, but that was also helping the reconnection with myself, because when I started burning out and I didn’t know what was happening, and it was a really scary place to be in, I talked to a coach, a counsellor, and a cranial therapist within about ten days of each other, altogether, none of them knew each other and each of them told me that my mind-body connection was virtually severed and that was a huge shock to me because I am quite a touchy-feely person, I am really in touch with my emotions and to be told that my mind-body connection was virtually non-existent, I felt really ashamed, I felt I had failed and I just felt that can’t be me. And spending time in nature and time at that lower pace, really helped me to build that mind-body connection and the other thing about the seasons that is fascinating, the seasons are not the same all year round. You can say this to anybody, and they probably look at you and go ‘of course they are not’, but actually we expect ourselves to be the same all year round. We expect ourselves to be pushing and striving and taking action and that is one of the reasons that I put this course together because it is about learning from the seasons that we can take down time, in the winter it is about hibernation and in the Spring, it is about growth, so we want to do things and so the seasons go. So I learned a lot of my self-care from that time, so lots of really important messages, lots of really important learnings from that recovery.

Holly: And what measures have you put in place now to avoid having experiencing burnout and adrenal fatigue in the future?

Heather: Well regular walking definitely, I can not come back from a walk in a bad mood. It doesn’t matter whether it is a twenty minute walk or a two hour walk, I always come back from a walk feeling good and that coupled with time in nature, time in greenery, time in space, time with birdsong and all of that and the other thing is that you don’t have to go that far in this country to find some green space, it might be a canal or a river or a local park or even a lot of our streets have trees. Immersed in nature is great but you don’t have to do that. Then, because my mind-body connection is much better again now, and because I know myself really well now, the messages, I get messages even sooner if I am starting to do too much and I feel it in my body and I just start doing less, I stop and I take a break. And I know what I need to get through a year so in my diary at this time of year, when I am planning for the following year, I am making sure that I have lots of breaks in there and this year was an interesting year because I had lots of breaks in and then of course none of them happened and I found myself with the great temptation to just pick up my computer and not always to be hard working, but to be exploring things, to be looking at things, to be coming up with ideas and then it got to about August and I had to admit that I was not burning out but I had been doing too much of this, I had to stop a bit and so I do need those things in place and I work better when they are in place and I work better. Looking after ourselves is not a case of you find out how to do it and then that’s it, it is done, you have to keep doing it. I see so many women, especially women, just pushing themselves on and on and on and saying what I said, ‘oh I can’t stop because I have got clients, because I have got people who rely on me’, and at the end of the day, when you have to stop, and you don’t want to get to that point, people usually come back and go, ‘listen health is the most important thing, sort yourself out and then we will pick up’, because actually we do care quite a lot most of us, but it is a hard thing to tell lots of people.

Holly: It is, it is, especially when we are passionate about these things it can be hard to dial it back and take a break because when you love what you do you just want to do more of it.

Heather: Exactly, absolutely and it is part of your life, so it doesn’t feel like some kind of concrete thing that you move on from, it is all integrated and I know for me it is totally integrated, because health is my number one value and walking and the work that I do through walking allows me to honour that value.

Holly: So how did you turn walking into a business?

Heather: Well I had two goes at it, I started in 2006 when I used walking to recover from a sore back because of pulling some muscle or something on holidays and I always felt that it was the universe saying to me, ‘do you know what Heather you have been talking about doing more exercise, you never do it, and this is what we are doing now to step in there and say stop and you have got to take it seriously’. And so I started walking and really enjoyed it and then started to think, could I run a business through this? So I had three different strands, I tried three different strands, some worked, some didn’t and then at the end of a couple of years I had to decide that it wasn’t working the way that I wanted it to, it wasn’t bringing in the kind of income and so I put it aside. Fast forward to having done bits of walking, having continued walking myself and always, started doing the Camino in 2008, always wanted to take groups of women out on the Camino walking and do coaching personal development stuff with them, this was always in the back of my head. Just before burnout, I was talking about finding ways to make these walking adventures and walking retreats happen and then when I burnout I was actually doing some work with a mentor at the time and she said to me, ‘Heather all the time I have known you, you have wanted to take women walking, why on earth are you trying to find all these other things, why don’t you just do it?’. I was in recovery at the time, it was like this permission she had given me, and what was interesting was I had to do a visualisation that day to do with a deer and what I had taken from this and basically I had been able to stroke this wild deer and my takeaway from it was perhaps I am being too literal in looking and making this business work, perhaps I am being too realistic and perhaps I have to dream a bit and trust, because I think I was always putting obstacles in the way. And that evening, while I was driving home, I always drive up through Epping Forest, and I especially there are two paths and I always drive up the one that takes me up through the centre of the forest. As I came round the corner that evening there was not just one but three deer on the path and I still get goosebumps when I tell that, and it was like, ‘if you want a sign Heather there is a sign’.

Holly: Here we are! {laughing}

Heather: That was 2015 and I was cleared of adrenal fatigue and my daughter went to university in September and I decided not to go back to work until I got her to Uni and then I went back to work at the end of October and set up the next business, really to start properly in 2016 and it was all about using walking as a vehicle for self-care, nurturing personal development. Because walking, although most people think of it as physicality, the mental health side of it is just as important, if not more so. And so the business that I now run, and the business that I have created, is all about bringing walking into our lives for health and wellbeing and to help us discover who we really are and to create the life we really want. I do that on lots of levels, a bit more online than I ever have this year, but my favourite thing is as I am sure you can imagine is actually to take a small group of women out on a long distance path.

Holly: Absolutely, it is the best to a group out and see the reactions and hear them going, ‘oh this is so beautiful’ and it is a trail that you have maybe walked 35 or 40 times in the last few years but you are showing it to them for the first time and oh I love it!

Heather: Yes, you get to see it through their eyes, their joy, it is stunning, absolutely stunning and it is really interesting Holly, we did a survey that I have yet to write up but it was all about lockdown and walking and we had about 1200 responses and 61% of women started walking more during lockdown, for mental health, physical health, escape, that kind of thing and I think it was about 35% wanted to continue it when lockdown stopped, I think it is so important.

Holly: It is and one of the things that I loved about lockdown, both of these lockdowns that we have had this year in the UK, is seeing more people out on the trails.

Heather: Yes. Totally agree.

Holly: Love it! What are all the different ways that you help others through walking?

Heather: As I say, there are a range of offline and online from the very simple, we have a seven day mindful walking programme that people can just try out and it only takes about twenty minutes a day for seven days and we have a walk challenge that people can join and pledge their mileage for the year. Then we have right through that to walk experiences and walk retreats and walk retreats tend to be shorter five days all-in where we do a bit less walking and a bit more journalling and discussion and debate and then the walk experiences, and the Camino experiences, tend to be five or six days with a travel day on each side and they are more challenging walking, we give them a lot of help to get trained and tell them what to pack and that sort of thing and we do some personal development as well and people often buy coaching then as a result of that. And I do some coaching stuff, I don’t do some coaching stuff, I coach people as well!  How much walking they choose to put into that is entirely up to them. Sometimes I do it face-to-face and we do walk and talk and other times I am saying to them, ‘take yourself out for a walk and allow that time to just give you the space to create and to think because I do feel especially with women, when they are at home, they find so many other things to do instead. So I also have a number of initiatives and I am delighted to do with other people, with a nutritionist I do a walking and cooking retreat and with a landscape archeologist we are looking at doing some landscape walking and history stuff, which is very exciting. I am doing a walking and writing retreat with someone else and we are building the whole one million women walking community as well and taking that. We are global, we have got just about 5500 women now and we plan to take some of that offline as well as time goes on and set up walk leaders all over the world and take that whole community which supports my mission which is to impact the lives of one million women through walking.

Holly: And how did that get started, one million women walking?

Heather: That was a mentor and I talking about, what is the bottom line to what you do, Heather? And just drilling down, drilling down and realising actually what I want to do is impact the lives of women through walking. And she said, how many women? And I went: a million?

Holly: {laughing} It sounds like a good round number!

Heather: So 1 November we started this Facebook community last year and had no idea how many women we would hit in our birthday year and got to the point of 5000 and we managed to get to I think 5326 or something. We welcome about 100 women in there every week on average, it is and amazing community of women who post photographs, ask questions, help and support each other all over the world.

Holly: Excellent, I love it, I love it because I think walking as you said, it is not just for physical fitness, it is for mental health and wellbeing. It helps the entire system.

Heather: And it is so easy to integrate into your every day that is I think the other thing. So many of us we don’t exercise or we have to go to the swimming pool and do our hair and our makeup or we have to run and then we have to find the time to run and then come back and shower afterwards. Or we cycle but what do we do with our bikes? You know all those kinds of things, whereas walking you can do.

Holly: Yeah, absolutely and you can make it as challenging or as easy as you want. It is so customisable to the experience that you want.

Heather: Then you can use it as a stepping stone to get fitter and do more and then you can give yourself a bigger target, you know.

Holly: Yeah Absolutely. I have signed up, inspired by a friend of mine, for two walking ultras next year, so I am going to be doing a 50k and 100k, and I have never done that before, I have never just pushed on through and jut gotten in the kilometres, so I am very much looking forward to that.

Heather: That’s an interesting one, oh do tell me about that, we will have to chat about that.

Holly: Yes we will! We will see how it goes. A couple of weekends ago I did a training walk and I did 35k and that went really, really, well but it is a totally different experience from other types of walking and I wasn’t taking my time, I wasn’t stopping, I was just pushing on through and it was very, very different experience. I enjoyed it but I was very conscious of how different it was.

Heather: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, brilliant, excited about that.

Holly: So where can people find you online and find out more about your work and your walks about what you do?

Heather: Well the website is 1millionwomenwalking.com and then the Facebook group is Facebook.com/groups/onemillionwomenwalking (and that is the word one this time), and you will also get me on Twitter, HeatherWaring, on Instagram, HeatherYWaring, you will get me on LinkedIn as Heather Waring and I think that is about it. I can send you these links so you can post them in your notes or whatever?

Holly: Yes, I think I have got them already but I will definitely put them in the show notes so people can find them. So do you have any final words of wisdom for someone who wants to get into walking?

Heather: The biggest words of wisdom are: stop overthinking it and just do it. Have a pair of flat, comfortable shoes, they can be trainers, they don’t have to be walking shoes, decide you are going to get out there and do it. Even if it is walking around the block or ten minutes down the round turn around and ten minutes coming back, that it is all it actually takes and you can extend it little be little day upon day, week upon week and one of the great things to do is to find someone to do it with, or be accountable to in the early days. So if you have got a neighbour or friend that you can meet up with and go for a walk, and we can still do that or if you have just got somebody you can text or message and say, ‘right I am going to walk every day this week, I am going to text you in the morning and let you know I have done it’. When we have to be accountable to others, it does make us more likely to do it and once you start to establish that pattern then you will start to really enjoy it, and just want to do it.

Holly: Yes! I love it. Thank you so much for joining us today, I can’t wait to get this out out to the podcast and encourage other people to start walking.

Heather: Thanks Holly it. Has been an absolute pleasure to chat with you, thank you very much for having me.

Holly: Thank you.

 

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