'Stay local to exercise' is rubbish

[ThePants999]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52062209

Taking public transport to start your exercise is obviously counterproductive.

Driving to somewhere where loads of other people are also going to exercise is not exactly ideal.

Driving to somewhere in the middle of nowhere to go for a walk? Not only is that perfectly safe, I'm going to assert that it's BETTER than walking from your house, especially if you live in a built-up area.

AIBU? And if I'm being U - why? How am I endangering anyone by going out to the countryside by car instead of walking round my town?

It seems the vote is pretty evenly split.

I'm sure lots of reasons already been given by others who think YABU - lots more people are off work, if everyone decides to do this thats a lot of cars on the road that don't need to be there, and more potential for accidents.

I live in a city and we usually go hiking most weekends. I'm really missing driving out to the country to go walking all day. I think people who continue to do it are very selfish.
It's a bit difficult to keep distance walking on pavements but where I live most people are trying their best 😊

Yes it's crap being stuck at home, but it really isn't the end of the world (I hope!). Its not great for the body or mind but in most cases we will manage.
If we go on actual full lockdown we wouldn't be allowed out for exercise at all.

I'm half hoping the weather will worsen then people won't be so keen on getting out and about.

I live by the sea. Every bugger is up there now, where its normally pretty quiet, so I thought if I drive 10 mins to the woods, we can walk kids and dog in easy isolation. If we don't do that it's walk round the shore where the path is narrow and lots of other people are walking.

The chief medical officer for scotland, rightly or wrongly, agreed yesterday that a short drive to exercise kids is fine. I do think it’s common sense. Stay away from national parks.

So many of these bloody threads. 'What's wrong with a 10 minute drive to my allotment/field/outdoor space, I literally see/come into contact with no one' blah blah blah.

Yes you might not see anyone, it's the point that if EVERYONE thinks this and applies this to them then it creates more traffic on the roads, stops at petrol stations and increases the risk of accidents and using resources that wouldn't need to be used if you just walked out your front door, went for a 15/20 min walk in your area and walked back in.

There is absolutely no need to be using your car other than to go to and from work or providing critical care for someone who can't get someone to do it for them.

It's exhausting.

I think this is the bubble theory - isolation also helps to contain coronavirus by area - like a fire. If people travel to exercise it potentially moves it around.

We live rurally and have been inundated by people coming to walk the footpaths running through our fields. We have to open and close the gates numerous times on a daily basis as it is currently the busiest time of the year for farmers like ourselves. This means that we are being put at risk by the so many people touching all the gates, fences etc which we have no choice but to do so.

@Xenia
"There may be an argument for killing all domestic pets for the sake of the nation at some stage."

No there isn't. Any issues caused by them needing exercise is overshadowed by the comfort and companionship they bring.

We aren't getting rid of the virus by staying in, we are just delaying getting it and spacing out our hospital care and death/recovery (many are being left with lung damage).

Other countries which still live with the threat of diseases, that can kill them, still have a semblance of what is out normal life, including pets.

In terms, of living rurally, use the knowledge that we, have and consider your infection risk. It was said last night that this may go on for six months. But unless we get a vaccine or we become immune, for a while, we will have to live with this virus.

We live in the middle of nowhere, with a footpath down our farm drive.

During "lockdown" there have been a steady stream of people constantly driving to our isolated location to walk down the footpath. On an entirely selfish level, it's increasing my family's risk of contracting this ten fold.

My husband is a farmer and his risk is increased due to the sheer volume of people touching gates as they walk through. He's working fairly constantly to keep up with the current supply demand on fresh produce, if he becomes ill it's counterproductive as a front line worker.

More generally the people driving out to exercise are presumably not well versed with walking in the countryside so we're also getting an influx of loose dogs being allowed to run in and destroy arable crops, which again is counterintuitive when you're trying to produce food for the nation.

The roads around here are narrow country lanes and people who are not used to driving on them tend to drive far far too quickly. The problem with rural roads at this time of year is there are a lot of big tractors and kit around here and generally if a car runs into a tractors front weights, it's not a happy ending.

The main reason for the "non essential travel" is to protect the NHS from further strain on resources through stuff like RTAs. Just stay local. Now is not the time to start exploring the countryside, and it's bloody infuriating when you're following the governments advice to see a whole raft of people who think the rules don't apply to them.

I wish Boris hadn't mentioned "once" and stuck to the real principle, which is to minimise the time spent outside the house.

Based on the total lack of decency and common sense displayed by many posters on this thread, I can quite see why he couldn't.

People clearly can't be trusted to just do the right thing.

Nobody is going to kill my cat thank you, She's 18, has survived two terminally ill episodes and is the light of my life. What benefit is there to killing her, she goes out for maybe 10 minutes a few times a day to bask on the sun lounger in the garden when it's sunny, never goes any further. She's going to enjoy her retirement if it's the last thing I do

The thing about this (and the 'what's the difference in going out for one long walk or for two shorter ones?' and the 'I'm isolating alone, what's the harm in meeting such-and-such who has been isolating alone for a walk and staying 2 metres apart?' and all of the other loopholes people keep looking for is that yes, it probably would be fine if one person was doing that. But if every single household in the UK took the same approach, what would be the point in having a lockdown at all?

I have dogs who are used to being walked off lead for around two hours a day, on various walks but mostly woodland ones around a five minute drive from our house. On a busy day I may see one person in the woods. On more popular walks locally I might see eight or nine people but the car park would be busy. Since the instruction to stay inside except for exercise, shopping etc, I have cut down to less than an hour and stuck to these woodland walks rather than the more popular walks.
Yesterday police were not allowing anybody up the main road these quiet walks are off. Our local fb page was flaming people because there were eight cars at the popular spot, which is on a different, open, road. Those eight people/ families had a massive area to walk in and would probably not come across each other, but they were being called all sorts of insults.
So I had the choice of walking my dogs in the local, small, park which is always full of dog walkers in normal times, and at the moment is full of pretty much the whole town who have got cabin fever so went for a walk, or lead walking my dogs round the local streets, which are also full of all the people walking to the park, shops, etc.
I chose to drive to the park, to limit the time I was out whilst giving the dogs a chance to run. There I had to walk near well over a hundred people, and though we all kept as far as possible from each other we were in the same small area.
If the police were not blocking the road I could walk in solitude, not touching anything, not near anybody’s house or farm.
This is what I think pp are trying to say. Not that we are special, that the rules don’t apply to us etc, but that for a lot of people the rules, as interpreted by the police, are actually making us more likely to catch or spread the virus. Having dogs doesn’t make us special, but does mean we have to take them walks when we might have chosen to stay home otherwise. This is animal welfare, not us thinking we are exempt from rules. If the day comes we can’t walk our dogs we will all have to stop, but at the moment we need to keep them as healthy as we can.

Driving locally should be fine IF you are living in a very remote location. I get the bit about more accidents and more petrol, but just down remote lanes in your local area isn't going to upset anyone - yet. Maybe more stringent rules in the future will ban this though.

The problem is that people think of remote as some well-known beauty spot that others will flock to. Genuine remote, like round here, is so off-grid that no-one knows half these lanes even exist except the (very odd) local....half the lanes are just tracks anyway. No problem with driving to such places.....

Most people aren’t idiots.

If this pandemic has proved anything at all, it’s that an awful lot of people ARE in fact idiots and will happily spoil it for the rest of us. This thread is a case in point.

Exercise locally is a busy beach for us. Whereas if I drove to exercise (which I'm not) I could go somewhere completely deserted.

FFS!!!!! It's NOT essential to exercise in the middle of nowhere! Not an ESSENTIAL car journey.
You do realise that they are likely to be making lockdown more severe because of all these 'exceptions'...???

Sadly the idiots out there have ruined it for everyone else. I live in the Peak District and it has been insane this week. I have never seen so many people ever. Not even on sunny bank holidays. We have groups of people picnicking, playing rounders, taking down the chain across our closed pub drive to sit on the decking and eat and drink their own food and alcohol regardless that this is the home of the landlords, numerous cases of sheep worrying and attacks leading to aborted lambs and dead pregnant ewes, damaged dry stone walls due to off road motorbikes and so many cars parked on the lanes that the oil tanker deliveries have not been able to get through so lots of elderly people, and others, not able to heat water and their homes when this sunny spell is over. june that's terrible. Please stay away from farms. They're a place of work not a playground. Keep your dogs away from sheep.

I live in a very densely populated area. It's deserted, even more so early morning, not a soul. Just walk.

I live 15min drive from the sea. 10minutes from a mountain. It's not an.essential journey, so I'm running from.my house. There are v few people about. I would much rather go somewhere nice, but I can't right now. Sadly, all the people who were trying to come into wales yesterday seemed to think.that they need to flock.to somewhere nice too.

"58I8toys
I hate the human race sometimes. It doesn't apply to me because blah blah blah. Selfish. There are other things to think about apart from ourselves".
OMG you just summed up my view of this thread perfectly. Selfish people. So depressing. It explains why this is spreading. Moaning about their quality of exercise! While all the poor minimum wage slaves are forced to get coughed on in care homes, supermarkets and cleaning jobs. They would give anything to stay at home and not get sick.
If everyone in the country drives to exercise it will up the spread by a percentage. Why are people so idiotic and selfish. People I know have gone down in my estimation by 'bending the rules'.....you are killing people. Stay at home.

we're also getting an influx of loose dogs being allowed to run in and destroy arable crops

I think on another thread someone suggested farmers put up signs saying off-lead dogs would be shot on sight. I have no sympathy with anyone letting their dogs off lead at the moment, especially on farmland, and especially near farm animals, but also crops.

What parts of ESSENTIAL TRAVEL ONLY do idiots like this not understand. These overnight 'outdoor enthusiasts' have probably never shifted their arses off the couch for last 5 years but suddenly the need to be out in the great outdoors outweighs Netflix and their wants override government instruction.

This is what I think pp are trying to say. Not that we are special, that the rules don’t apply to us etc, but that for a lot of people the rules, as interpreted by the police, are actually making us more likely to catch or spread the virus

This. I’m not special, I just know walking my dog in an open space far from other people 5 min from my house is less of a risk than walking him through the queue at the butchers and greengrocers or past the millions of other people on the narrow pavements. It’s not about being special, it’s distancing yourself as much as possible. If you drive to crack alley and walk amongst abandoned mattresses with springs sticking out and pushed over dustbins it would probably be fine but people are outraged that you might see a tree or have a nice time. Nobody seems to give any fucks that I need to drive to hospital to work with patients with the damn virus but are appalled that I drive a few minutes, literally to try and distance myself, to walk my dog. For what it’s worth, I can walk on nice footpaths from home but they are narrow and busy (relatively) and I’m high risk in terms of being exposed so I’m making a massive effort to not be next to people. I don’t let my dog off the lead anywhere because he’s a dick.

Mr Johnson did not help by being vague about exercise- it should be a walk or cycle from your home, not by car. After the 'isolation tourism' that prompted the current restrictions, should have been the instruction given.

Comments about petrol stations and road crashes made by others I agree with.

The thing is that if lots of people have the same idea you get the same issues which were prevalent last week and led to the lockdown. The people who live in rural and seaside places shouldn't have to suffer the poor behaviour of idiots who are arrogant enough to think things like social distancing, the countryside code, basic manners, etc.