The quiet devotion behind every walk
- Elle Beecher
- Mar 26
- 7 min read
Izzy sent a text on Thursday morning.
Nothing urgent. Just a note to the host group chat:
"Okay don't know about you guys but usually I get pumped to host the walk on Friday. Like it just hits me the day before "yay I am really doing this cool thing tomorrow!" but this week it's happening today! All this to say, happy Thursday! 🧡"
Alison from Columbus responded.
"Ahh I love that! I'm out of town the next few Saturdays and every time I get a Meetup notification of a new person signing up, I get FOMO of it being an amazing walk and I won't be there! It's so lovely how this cool thing we're all a part of comes into everyday life, isn't it? 🥰"
I read those two messages and thought "I need to share this."
Most people look at The Board Walks and see the event.
The five miles. The thoughtful topics. The group photo with everyone slightly windswept and inexplicably happy. The Meetup network. The numbers: over 18,000 walkers, 10+ cities, hundreds of Saturdays since July 2022.
What they don't see is the Thursday texts. The group chats that come alive with photos and fun moments. The hosts who are thinking about their walk on a Tuesday, feeling it on a Thursday, dreaming up the question on a Friday night. The ones who show up to an empty trail sometimes and post a selfie anyway: "I'm gonna keep going."
What they don't see is the gardener.
Cristina Espinal started the London chapter when there was no guarantee anyone would show up. And for a stretch at the beginning, they didn't. She'd get fifteen RSVPs. She'd show up. The trail would be empty. But she kept showing up anyway because she believed the space should exist. She'd felt the walk's energy all the way over in Texas and decided that people in her city deserved to feel it too.
Because some things are worth tending before you know what they'll grow into.
Now, Cristina's regulars bring her cinnamon rolls on Saturday mornings. They write to her and say: "This walk is non-negotiable for my week. It's where I come to hear myself. To unplug. To have an appointment with my higher self." When Cristina is away, Daksha steps up to hold the space, because at some point the community stopped being Cristina's and became everyone's.
This is the pattern we keep seeing, everywhere. When Alison is traveling, our beloved regulars Xiang and Wendy show up to host in Columbus with the same enthusiasm she would. Tim and Sumit do the same in San Francisco. Julia, Alice, and Nikki do the same in Austin.
Kenji shows up in Denver (in freezing temperatures, on the kind of mornings that make you question every decision you've ever made) and recently had a woman come back after a long time away and say: "I'm so excited to be back. I love having these grown-up conversations!"
The host plants the flag. The people who love the space enough to protect it are the ones who tell you something real has been built.
That's the graduation. You just look up one day and realize the thing you were tending has started tending itself.
I think about Walk #13 in Austin.
Near the beginning of this adventure, October 2022. Five people showed up.
One of them looked around and said: "Small group today. Should we still walk?"
I said: "Heck yeah, we're walking!"
We walked. We talked. We went deep in the way you can only go when the group is small, when there's nowhere to hide, when five miles is enough time and quiet enough space for people to finally say the thing they've been carrying. That walk became one of my favorites. Five people. A conversation that went so deep we walked longer than we ever had before... five miles, to be exact. Yes... that small walk is where our official distance was born.
When I see a walk with five people now, I don't see a failure.
I see a best case scenario.
I see five agents of change. Five people about to go back into their lives a little more open, a little more curious, a little more convinced that the stranger next to them is worth understanding. Five people who will be kinder to a barista because they're feeling full instead of depleted. Who will ask a follow-up question instead of waiting for their turn to talk. Who will go home and, in some way you can never trace or measure, make the world around them slightly lighter.
Five people create ripples in the fabric of society.
And all that happens because the host shows up.
Some mornings that's easy. The light is good, the air is cool, and you walk out the door already feeling like yourself. Those mornings, hosting feels like a gift you get to give.
Other mornings are different.
I've hosted when I was running on empty. When I was going through something I didn't have language for yet. When I'd just quit my job at Meta in 2024 and the ground felt a little shaky under my feet. When I was heartbroken in the way that makes the couch look like a permanent parking spot. When it was cold and early and the alarm went off and every cell in my body said "not today."
I went anyway. Somewhere between lacing up my shoes and the first mile, I already knew what years of doing this had taught me:
The act of showing up creates its own energy.
You give what you have, even when what you have feels like nothing, and you come home more full than when you left. Every single time.
That's the strange alchemy of this thing. You pour out and find yourself refilled. You tend the garden and the garden tends you back.
Some examples from this month:
Izzy's uncle came to the Detroit walk when he was just passing through the city.
His flight hadn't left yet. He walked with the group, and afterward pulled Izzy aside to tell her something she wasn't expecting: he could feel the walk's design working on him in real time. The structure of it: the speech, the topics, the way the whole thing creates openings. He said it generated a conversation with his niece that wouldn't have happened across a dinner table.
He got clarity that day. On a trail. In a city he doesn't even live in. And most surprising of all, the biggest insights came from his own niece.
Mark came to the Detroit walk alone, too. He and his wife have been together since high school. Happily married, but in their late thirties they found themselves on separate self-discovery journeys, each carrying questions the other couldn't fully answer. Becoming yourself is sometimes a solo excavation, even when you love someone deeply. He needed somewhere to bring those questions.
He came to the walk. Nobody asked why he came alone. Nobody made it a thing. He just walked, talked, and discovered (the way you always discover on these walks, slightly surprised every time) that he wasn't the only one figuring himself out in the middle of his life. He left lighter than he arrived.
That only happens because Izzy shows up.
The riverbank is the best metaphor I have for what our hosts actually do.
A river needs its banks. Not to control the water; the water does what it wants, it moves and changes and carries whatever falls into it. But the banks hold the shape. They're what make the river a river instead of just water spreading thin, dispersing, disappearing into the ground.
Our hosts are the riverbank. Every Saturday, they hold the shape.
And because they do, the river flows. Conversations happen that wouldn't happen anywhere else. Fourteen people who'd never meet otherwise spill into a taco spot after the walk and plan a road trip together. Someone says something out loud for the first time and a stranger walking next to them says "me too," and something in that person... something held tight and braced for years... finally exhales.
Almost four years of this, what moves me most is not the numbers or the cities.
It's the quiet devotion that makes the magic possible.
So this one's for the gardeners...
For Izzy Quane, who gets pumped on a Thursday and hosts along the Detroit River in the dead of winter with so much warmth that even the bald eagles stop to look.
For Alison Sumich, who loves the walk so much that a Meetup notification from across the country still stops her in her tracks.
For Cristina Espinal, who decided the space should exist before anyone showed up to prove her right.
For Daksha in London, Logan in NYC, Xiang and Wendy in Columbus, Tim and Sumit in San Francisco, Julia and Nikki in Austin. And many more. The regulars who step up without hesitation, because the space has become theirs too.
For Kenji Fullwood, who hosts in Denver in below-freezing temperatures and recently had someone walk back through the door after time away and say: "Wow, I missed this place. I love having these grown-up conversations!"
For Cameron Hogan, who has people tell him every week that his Austin walk is the highlight of their schedule. And who somehow makes 60 people feel like a small group.
For Alice Chen in San Francisco, who has grown more confident in public speaking one Ground Rules speech at a time. In front of a couple dozen strangers, every Saturday, until it felt natural.
For Adele Bloch, who brought the walks to San Francisco back in 2023 and faithfully watered the garden for 100 weeks. 2 years of devotion created thousands of connections and conversations that live on to this day.
For Sophy Sun and Sarah Wilkinson in NYC, who showed up in a city of eight million people and somehow make every walker feel like the only person on the trail. Below freezing. Big smiles. Every time.
For Catherine Roten in Boone — a town of 20,000 people — who are out here building a portal to presence with a beloved core group of regulars who keep coming back because the space feels like home.
For Sohil Shyamsundar, who is growing the Atlanta chapter rapidly by simply being himself. Who ends each walk by having everyone put their hands in the middle and say one word that stood out to them that day — attention is currency, ATL — because he understands that it's the moments of play that people come back for.
For Melissa Cao, who hosted in Boston through heavy snow and fallen trees covering her path, and had people tell her: "I didn't even feel the cold after all these warm conversations!"
And for Megan Farrell, who hosted her very first walk in Sacramento last week, rated it a 10 out of 10, and wrote that people came specifically to push themselves out of their comfort zone. First walk. Ten out of ten. That's how you start.
We see every single one of you.
And we are so grateful.
The Board Walks happen every Saturday in 10+ cities. Free. Phone-free. Five miles. Find your walk and RSVP here.
