I'm British and I found the article funny and relatable. I'm sick to death of aimless walks.
It's more the fact that apart from three weeks a year, British weather is relentlessly miserable.
So a "walk" - always in the country, because no one walks in cities - means shivering joylessly around an obstacle course of mud, rain, fog, marshy ground, drizzle, sleet, and snow.
For reasons I have never understood, this is considered a fun thing to do.
"So people walked, women as well as men. When Keats went on his tour of Scotland in 1818, he went by public coach as far as Lancashire and on foot thereafter. Worsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge began a similar Scottish tour together on foot, Coleridge branching off by himself at Stirling and continuing for nearly 300 miles until there was nothing left of his shoes. Dorothy Wordsworth, with a friend or relative, regularly walked from Penrith across the Pennines and moors to visit the Hutchinsons near Halifax. Hazlitt would walk from London to his writing base at Winterslow in Wiltshire. His first wife Sarah, while waiting for her Scottish divorce in Edinburgh, walked a total of over 200 miles to vist places of interest. Painters were great walkers, too, like the 'Ancients',who walked from London to see their friend Samuel Palmer on the Kentish coast at Shoreham, or Michael Angelo Rooker, who spent his summers 'pedestrian excursions, 18 miles a day.' So were musicians: The young Richard Wagner, despite his short legs, walked from Dresden to Leipzig and back. Saving money was one motive, seeing nature another, exercise a third. When the painter John Hoppner stayed with the nautical Duke of Clarence at Petersham, he was taken off every day after dinner for 'a walk of 10 or 12 miles."
No mention of the weather. I have more than once on reflecting on this passage wondered at the quality of their shoes.
[edited some egregious typos]
The people in the comments here seem to think this innocuous article is a personal attack on them or their hobby, or that people aren't allowed to have a good moan if they feel like it (moaning being another great pasttime of the British).
I think the author is attacking the normalisation of such trudging, rather than the trudging itself.
You just described my entire family.
The advantage of being surrounded by folks like this is I get to exercise (as in "keep it in shape") my built-in aversion to peer pressure daily.
Body weight exercises are a great form of strength training you can do anywhere with no equipment. You can replace walks with runs, sprints, or interval training. If you have an appropriate body of water near you, you can also go swimming without going to a gym or pool. Start intervals of boxing the air (if you haven’t done it before, you’ll be shocked at how long 45s is while you’re punching as quickly as you can).
With a minimal investment, you can take up jumprope. An excellent cardio exercise. Alternatively, grab a hula hoop, and learn to hula.
There are tons of exercises you can do that aren’t walking or going to a gym. It’s not a binary option.
Even worse is camping. Once youve trudged to a treeless brown spot in the middle of the woods, set up a tent you're left with nothing to do. So what do you do? You walk.