How the Travel Right Falkirk challenge has made a huge impact on her activity levels
Every month we are awarding one user 25,000 BetterPoints as our 'Ditch the Car Star' in the Travel Right Falkirk Challenge.
Our September winner is Anne. Before she joined the challenge, Anne wouldn’t have dreamt of making walking a replacement for her car journeys to her daily appointments.
We asked her what made her change her behaviour.
"Before lockdown and the latest Travel Right Falkirk challenge began, I used to use the car every day for work and it's only 3 miles away. So now I'm agile working (thanks to Covid) I decided I'd try something new and started walking to my appointments, dropped the shorter car journeys and made these journeys on foot. It's too easy to jump in the car so something needed to change. Going forward I'm going to try and up that, travel more sustainably by using the buses and then the rest of those journeys will be on foot.
The benefits I've seen is that it definitely helps me to get out from being shut away and get some contact with other people, saying hello as we pass each other. I'm getting more regular doses of fresh air and a fix of nature. Lots of my walking routes take me through Hallglen woods. I love it there; it really gives me that feel good feeling after. I'm pleased I've made some travel changes to help the environment. I drive a diesel car so any journeys I can cut back on help the planet. Another thing I'm planning to do when we do get back to a sort of normal, is taking a change of clothes and start running to work if we do ever get back there!
The challenge has made a huge impact on my activity levels. I would always run a couple of times a week but never spend the time walking from A to B as the norm. I would say I've doubled the time on my feet during this year taking part in the challenge.
What I enjoy about the app is that it knows what I'm doing and challenging me because it's clocking up the points in the background. This motivates me to walk further and to make sure I hit 10,000 steps every day.
What health benefits have you noticed being part of the Travel Right Falkirk challenge?
More importantly my family members are all using the app - one of them in particular was very inactive and now she's thinking of joining a walking club. I do worry about her as she's fairly isolated and this is going to make such a difference to her on every level.
As a family lots of us have high cholesterol and we know the fitter and more active we can be the more chance we have at lowering it. Thanks for getting us out the door on a regular basis." - Anne D
Congratulations Anne and well done for making those changes to get out and be more active.
If you've enjoyed walking and cycling more during lockdown, then don't slip back into old habits. Tell us how you're coming back to work, but better, by ditching your car and commuting on foot or by bike. Visit your activities tab in your app and complete our ‘Ditch the Car Star’ survey.
If you're still working from home, tell us about how you're keeping active by using the car less for short leisure and shopping journeys, or how you're gearing up to try cycling or walking to work when you do return.
You can submit an entry each month, so look out for messages in the app to remind you to tell us your story.
Be chosen as our monthly Ditch-the-Car star and win 25,000 BetterPoints and tell us how the challenge is helping you to 'Travel Right'.