internal weather report vol. 2: Hot Girl Walk
Change your life in four miles.
My rule for these impulsive dispatches is no editing, no overthinking, all feelings. Stay tuned for the regular edition sometime later this month.
Strava, the fitness tracking app, grew its user base significantly during the pandemic. Makes sense: bored and stuck at home, people picked up new active pursuits and briefly got excited about documenting them. Under new pressure to monetize that growth or retain users or whatever, the app has rolled out a host of changes obviously intended to get more users engaged and subscribed, from adding new sports tracking capabilities (hello pickleball) to changing pricing structures to targeting different user demographics. Enter the Hot Girl Walk challenge.
This Strava challenge wasn’t my first introduction to the Hot Girl Walk™, which appeared on the scene in early 2021. Created by 23-year-old Mia Lind, the “Hot Girl Walk™” consists of a four-mile walk where you think only about 1) what you’re grateful for, 2) what you want to accomplish, and 3) how hot you are. Lind’s TikTok explainer went viral, and now the Hot Girl Walk is not only a trending activity, but it’s own aesthetic. (If you’re curious: neutral matching active set or extremely high-waisted crinkle waistband shorts + crop top, sunnies, AirPods, belt bag, Hokas, iced coffee duh.)
With this context in mind, I had a good laugh reading Strava’s Hot Girl Walk challenge copy: “Hot is a mindset” blah blah blah. I was laying out my clothes for the next day’s run which would be the opposite of a Hot Girl Walk in every way, and I was feeling superior and a little sorry for Gen Z whose lives so often seem flattened into two-dimensional experiences pre-packaged for sharing online. Morning came, all dusty pink light, and I did the run, and it was a gooooood one, the kind that left me tired and exhilarated and happy.
So I pulled up the Hot Girl Walk screenshot again, for laughs, and what I read this time around vaporized any smug superiority I felt. “The Hot Girl Walk™ is a 4-mile outdoor walk that builds confidence through movement….” Confidence through movement. Isn’t that what running has done for you, I immediately heard in my mind. Isn’t movement the missing piece for all the places you feel stuck?
Lettering artist and author Jessica Hische coined the term PowerSave Mode for the shift that happens to a creative life (low-energy, low-output, etc.) during the early years of parenthood. She offered the term as reassurance, and I latched onto it that way, grateful for an explanation to cling to instead of dealing with how adrift I felt professionally. I took the projects that came my way, dreamed some dreams that went nowhere, and poured myself into my family. PowerSave Mode.
I’d like to be a person of depth, and only life experiences give you that. But what separates still waters from stagnant is flow, an under-the-surface motion that is directed somewhere. A nerd for new beginnings, I typically greet the new year with intensive reflecting and goal-setting. I choose a word. And….I couldn’t this year. Just kept dragging my feet and feeling progressively worse for doing so. Joke’s on me, though, because the word I needed has found me repeatedly anyway, a glint of truth obnoxiously catching my eye amid all manner of trivial life moments—including the Hot Girl Walk.
Raising children is an excellent way to work out your own hypocrisy, to grab the two threads of your values and your actions and make them align in the making of your life. This year, one of my children needs to figure out how to move from paralysis into the pool, a very literal leap of faith. Confidence through movement. He won’t be the only one.
Did you read this? Reply and tell me what kind of drink you’re sipping on your Hot Girl Walk.