Category Archives: Health and Wellness

What I Learned From My ‘Week Without Driving’

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How would your life change if driving wasn’t an option?

That is the question posed by Week Without Driving, an annual campaign — running the first week of October in 2026 — that aims to help those of us who do own a car interrogate our transportation habits. And learn to practice new ones.

Launched in 2021 as a Disability Movement Initiative, #WeekWithoutDriving encourages registered participants to put themselves in the shoes of people who can’t afford a vehicle, who have aged out of driving, who don’t qualify for a driver’s license or who are physically unable to drive.

“For people who can grab their keys and go, transportation often isn’t a major concern,” says the Week Without Driving homepage. “But for those of us who can’t drive or can’t afford to, transportation is something we think about daily.”

As the owner of a plug-in Prius and an active transportation advocate who aims to drive as little as possible, I decided to design my own Week Without Driving ahead of the actual event. I tracked my progress — and my setbacks — along with a few learnings that I hope will help others navigate the challenge.

Week Without Driving challenges you to rely on riding the bus, walking, biking/scooting or asking for rides to understand what it takes to get where you need to go without driving.

Prepare for a series of decisions.

In hindsight, I was smart to start my self-imposed Week Without Driving on a Sunday — when traffic is lighter and the world moves more slowly, when I could savor moving outdoors in the 70-degree sunshine.

I was scheduled to meet a friend for an outdoor brunch at W.A. Frost, long considered to have the best patio dining in St. Paul. Since I was headed that way, why not pick up a few groceries at my favorite food co-op? Both are on a Bus Rapid Transit line that stops three blocks from my house.

Photos by Amy Gage

And so began my planning for the first day of not driving:

  • I consulted the bus schedule the night before and put the options in my iPhone calendar.
  • I dressed carefully, ensuring that I wore shoes I could move in, but not too casually given the potential formality of a Sunday brunch.
  • And I skipped an 8 a.m. yoga class because I would have had to drive there after spending 45 minutes walking my two dogs. I opted instead to work in the kitchen and do my own hip-stretching routine at home.

None of it was hard to do — in fact, choosing to walk the 8 blocks between the restaurant and food co-op energized me after the leisurely meal — but active transportation did require more time and initiative than simply hopping in my car.

Would my willingness hold for the next six days of Week Without Driving? Truth be told, it didn’t. Walking that much (24,000 steps on my first day) eventually wore me down, and both transit and biking proved harder to manage on a couple of busy weekdays.

“Some short car trips are necessary; for example, health and mobility issues might limit our ability to walk. Other times, driving is convenient,” says the Environmental Protection Agency.

Aim to both inspire and inform.

People who refuse to take mass transit — or to walk or bike on at least some of their errands and activities — generally have little experience with active transportation.

Day 2 of my self-imposed Week Without Driving was rainy and chilly, and I probably would have driven had I been less committed to this challenge. Instead, I donned my raincoat and Oboz hiking shoes (the best) and walked to a neighborhood coffee shop to meet a fellow Planned Parenthood volunteer.

After I told him that I had to catch a bus in 70 minutes for another commitment — information that I like to share at the top of a meeting, so as not to appear rude when I have to bolt away — he said he rarely uses the city bus line a block from his house. He drove to this meeting a walkable distance from where he lives. He and his family even drove to the Minnesota State Fair last summer and paid 40 bucks to park on someone’s lawn because they didn’t want to wait in line for the event’s free bus network.

Later that afternoon, my banker expressed surprise that I had walked to our meeting during a heavy rainstorm. He told me he had driven to work rather than walk less than a mile because his legs were tired from refereeing his children’s soccer games the day before.

At age 69, I get it. I also understand that personal actions alone won’t solve the climate crisis. But first, can we agree that Americans’ obsession with driving is an unhealthy practice, both for our bodies and our environment?

I-94 in St. Paul (left); student housing near the University of St. Thomas

Consider:

  • The Environmental Protection Agency, even in the anti-climate Trump administration, encourages biking or walking to activities under a mile away. “Car trips of under a mile add up to about 10 billion miles per year,” the EPA says.
  • St. Paul’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan calls for 40% of all trips within the city to be taken by bus, bike or transit by 2030. That’s only four years away.
  • A 2025 study from the World Resources Institute says that “living car-free,” making a commitment to “walk, bike or take transit more,” and carpooling or bundling your errands into one trip when you do have to drive rank among the top 10 ways that individuals can make climate-friendly choices.

I mentioned none of this to the banker: Virtue signaling and shaming don’t motivate anyone to change. But maybe by cheerfully shrugging off a rainy walk, or explaining the convenience of Metro Transit’s BRT system to the Planned Parenthood volunteer when he inquired, I inspired them to rethink their choices.

“Transportation is often discussed as a service gap, but it is also a dignity issue. Mobility is not merely getting from point A to point B. It is the freedom to remain part of the world,” says age-friendly advocate Dave Beal.

Allow exceptions and grant yourself grace.

By 5 p.m. on the second day of my self-imposed Week Without Driving, I have 22,685 steps, and I’m done. I cancel my plans to hear “James” author Percival Everett at the University of St. Thomas that evening — it’s chilly and damp out, and it would have meant walking another couple of miles to and from campus — and instead settle in for the evening.

That highlights another reality of car-free living: You can’t overschedule your time, a habit that I find more difficult to manage as I age.

The next day, my husband and I ran errands in the Prius because I couldn’t persuade him to bike or take the bus. Excuses come easily when driving is more convenient. Still, Week Without Driving “is not a purity test,” a friend at the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota reminds me; in fact, the initiative’s guidelines assure participants that they didn’t “fail the challenge” if they set foot in a car.

Three factors make active transportation possible for me:

  • I am strong and healthy, thanks to a lifetime of health insurance coverage and parents who encouraged physical fitness, helping me develop a love of movement.
  • I live in an urban neighborhood conducive to not driving. Four bus lines and one light-rail train are within reasonable walking distance of my home, and the bicycle infrastructure slowly is improving.
  • I have the means to afford two bikes, various exercise shoes, a gym membership and strength-training equipment in my basement.

Not everyone enjoys all those advantages. Week Without Driving seeks to remind privileged people — those who have reliable transportation options and the physical means to move — what life is like for people who, for a variety of reasons, cannot drive.

The initiative asks us to advocate for systems change that will improve mobility, which the Mobility Lab, a research center in Arlington, Virginia, defines as having the time to get where you need to go, the ability to afford those transportation options and the safety to walk, bike or take transit.

“Living by a bus that comes once an hour isn’t mobility,” the Mobility Lab says, which is one reason why so many suburbanites drive everywhere. “Owning a car in a city with congested highways isn’t mobility either. To have mobility is to have access.”

Food for thought as we all prepare to vote this election season. Mobility, like other forms of equity, won’t just happen unless we work for it.

From Skinny to Strong: A Lifetime of Physical Fitness

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I’ve belonged to some manner of fitness club since my parents had a family membership at the YMCA, primarily to ensure we kids learned how to swim in a small town with public pools and nearby lakes. Back then, we called these facilities “gyms,” not health clubs or workout studios; and men seemed to use them more often than women.

At least that was true in my family: Dad exercised at the Y, playing racquetball, jogging on the circular track above the basketball court, doing calisthenics in an era when Jack LaLanne was on TV. In lieu of exercising, Mom would starve herself occasionally on the two-week Mayo Clinic Egg Diet and seemed to perpetually be battling her weight.

My father’s example looked more fun to me (plus, I like to eat), but I credit both of my parents with my instinctive need to move — as much for my mental health as physical strength and stamina. Dad set an example of daily exercise, whether golfing and running or taking us skiing and sledding at Ski Haven (since renamed Mount Kato), which still used towropes when I was a girl. Mom put me in dance classes from the age of 5, pushed us to “play outside” and outfitted all of us kids with bikes, which was how parents back then expected their children to get around.

Almost a quarter of adults engage in no physical activity outside of their jobs, and sedentary lifestyles are an important reason that two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese. 

U.S. Department of Transportation

As an adult, I morphed my physical activities from fun and games into practical purposes: walking, bike riding and using mass transit to get around before I bought my first car at age 25. I still tell my peers about how daily dog walks and active transportation — replacing car trips with human-powered mobility, such as walking or biking — are relatively effortless, enjoyable ways to stay in shape.

Those habits serve me well in my late 60s, at an age when thinning bones and prediabetes are a real risk, even for those of us who pay attention to our health. Like many women of my era, however, I’ve seen exercise primarily as a way to stay thin, a priority I internalized after gaining an unwanted 30 pounds during an unhappy period in my teens.

It’s not too late to get stronger, but it is time. No longer can I deny the physical weakening that comes with age.

Our bodies, ourselves

Of all the celebrities who flew in for the No Kings rally at the Minnesota State Capitol on March 27 — Bernie Sanders, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez — I was most excited to see Jane Fonda, still looking fit and energetic at 88. “She taught my generation of women to exercise rather than starve ourselves,” I told a friend.

The fitness studio craze took off in 1983, the year after Jane Fonda’s Workout video sparked a revolution and earned enough to support her political causes. I started attending classes at Leslie’s Shape Shop in Minneapolis with a friend and colleague. We’d squeeze into our tights and Spandex leotards, move and sweat to invigorating music, and afterward bond over office gossip, white wine and fatty appetizers. Elizabeth and I remain great friends to this day.

When I turned 40, with two young boys, a demanding career and a long commute, I decided to juggle more balls and become a step-aerobics instructor. Blessed with a natural sense of rhythm, I stole routines from classes at the Life Time Fitness in a former men’s athletic club across the street from my office in downtown St. Paul.

“Physical fitness is a three-legged stool: strength, aerobic capacity and flexibility.”

Jane Fonda’s Workout Book

Word spread, and middle-aged women began to fill my 8 a.m. Saturday classes back home at Olympus Athletic Club in Northfield. Drawn to the camaraderie and the beat of disco-influenced aerobics music, they also seemed to appreciate my mantra: Exercise is fun! The key is finding an activity that you enjoy.

That’s when fitness became not just a personal pleasure but a cause. A way to help myself and other women enter middle age with more agility and confidence and less shame. Not for us the deprivation diets and speedy pills of our mothers’ generation. Exercise would help us own and accept our bodies and claim our place in male-dominated spaces.

But however much I preached to my students about the three-legged stool of fitness (muscle strength, muscle length and sustaining a healthy heart rate), my busy brain and obsession with thinness have always led me to prioritize aerobic exercise. A recent unneeded and unexpected drop in weight, which my doctor and I concluded is a loss of muscle mass, has pushed me toward lifting weights in earnest.

Dumbbells sit side by side in a workout studio with a woman in the background lifting weights.
Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash

Gaining weights

Being thin is not enough anymore. At 68, I want to be strong enough to pick up my grandson, lift myself off the floor with no railing nearby, carry groceries, help move furniture around the house. That has meant setting aside my ego (and fear) and investing both time and money in getting stronger, which includes:

  • Paying the hefty fee for three sessions with a trainer, who has helped me focus on gluteal and hip strength and on rehabilitating an injured shoulder.
  • Learning how to use bands, kettlebells, TRX straps and weight machines for muscle work as well as conventional dumbbells.
  • Listening to my sons — both serious weightlifters — when they instruct me to eat more protein, lift heavier weights with fewer repetitions, and strengthen my bones with beginner plyometrics, a series of jumping exercises that has me jump-roping for the first time in decades.

The average 30-year-old can expect to lose about 25% of his or her muscle mass and strength by age 70, and another 25% by age 90. 

Harvard Health Online

Getting stronger has also meant finding a workout studio that helps seniors feel comfortable and welcome. Not the community center that had a great bone-strengthening yoga class, but where my strength trainer didn’t create a program specific to my needs. Nor the CorePower studio where I reveled in heated yoga classes for nine years, but which clearly was tailored to a younger generation.

Instead, using the Silver Sneakers benefits that come with my Medicare Advantage Plan, I’ve rejoined Life Time Fitness in a neighborhood with a growing amount of senior housing. The Aurora Program, launched in January 2022, offers specialized classes, opportunities for seniors to socialize and dedicated hours for us to work out.

At first, I balked at the limited hours — weekdays, 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; nothing on Saturday before 2 p.m. — and wondered whether Life Time, a for-profit company that markets itself to a young, fit, athletic population, wanted to make money off aging exercisers but keep us out of the way.

Image by freepik
Image by pch.vector on Freepik

Now I appreciate the chance to work on my weights program among people my own age. Invariably we older women exchange smiles and glances, acknowledging one another and offering unspoken encouragement.

I recently saw a white-haired woman walking with a book bag to the city library near my house. Slightly stooped, she moved with a shuffling gait, seeming to favor one foot. “That’s me in 15 years,” I said to my husband. Then I made the conscious decision to admire her determination. Instead of pitying the woman or — worse — turning away from the preview of my own inevitable decline, I kept watching.

“Rock on,” I whispered. “At least you’re out there.” Facing an uncertain future, and moving toward it.

Can a Mobile App Improve Seniors’ Mobility?

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I first went to a physical therapist two decades ago, in my 40s, when I injured my shoulder in yoga. Young, fit and overly sure of myself — a runner and bicyclist, an aerobics instructor — I didn’t do the exercises with any consistency, and I live with that mistake to this day.

After visiting a different PT twice in my early 60s for a pulled hamstring and another shoulder injury, I figured out that physical therapy, like yoga, only pays off with regular practice. If you commit to performing the highly specific, often tedious exercises every day — or nearly so — your body will heal and feel better. Otherwise, you likely will remain in pain.

Given that reality, how practical is the growing trend of providing physical therapy not in a clinical setting but via a mobile app that people can access at home?

Physical therapy traditionally has been hands-on. Photo by Raspopova Marina on Unsplash

My experience as a physically active 68-year-old woman dealing with the normal wear and tear of aging proves that it can, indeed, work. Hinge Health, a San Francisco–based company whose services are free through my Medicare Advantage plan, has been nothing short of a godsend for my stiff neck and perpetually impinged left shoulder.

Initially, I was skeptical whether video visits with a PT and a health coach could possibly be effective. But I was so tired of shoulder pain, which was hindering my spring bike riding, that I decided to try it last May.

“People come to us with a wide range of goals,” says Doctor of Physical Therapy Melanie Cosio, based in Mobile, Alabama, and serving members (the word Hinge Health prefers to “patients”) across the country. “We often see people getting ready for a surgery, whether sports-related or they slipped and fell at their house.”

She sees plenty of older people like me, who’ve been athletic our whole lives and — seemingly out of nowhere — are now more prone to injury or sudden aches and pains. “They want to stay on top of their mobility,” says Dr. Mel, as the program calls her.

Hinge Health also serves older adults who may be housebound, lack access to in-person appointments or want a daily dose of motivation, backed by scientific research. “Hinge Health gets us into people’s homes, no matter how rural they are,” she explains. “The connection I can make via video is really impactful. We’re also making programs that are easy to digest and access from someone’s phone.”

“Our stretching and strengthening exercises help your body get more resilient and train your nervous system to better cope with pain.”

Hinge Health mobile app, education library

Traditional physical therapy states that movement is medicine. Hinge Health translates that time-honored philosophy into a 21st century AI-powered program that potentially reaches more people and keeps them exercising longer.

Rewards, including free exercise gear and performance badges, are woven throughout the program. Key to why Hinge Health works, however, is reliance on the foundations of successful physical therapy — motivation, consistency and education — but with a modern, more accessible twist.

Daily texts provide chipper reminders to “exercise for better sleep and a more vibrant you,” “keep marching forward” and “get up and glow.” Those prove to be more motivational than annoying. In fact, the messages work to plant a seed: I’d better do this today if I want to hit my weekly goal.

The daily playlists are no more than 11 minutes, and each session earns points that eventually push you to the next level, with progressively harder exercises. At the end of each session, you can indicate whether a particular movement was too hard or too easy, and the system will adjust your playlist’s difficulty.

An assigned physical therapist and health coach are within easy reach through the app and typically respond within a day. More immediately, Hinge Health’s TrueMotion® AI technology, or “real-time feedback,” lets you track through your smartphone whether you’re performing the exercises correctly.

“Laser beams of light are being shot so they can monitor where you are,” explains Tony Schmitz, a Hinge Health member from St. Paul, Minnesota. “It’s a little Wizard of Oz-ish: Who’s behind the curtain, really? Maybe it’s all AI and there is no person.”

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

More enticing for me than the technology was the free equipment. Hinge Health sent a phone stand when I finally enrolled last spring, after my insurance provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, mailed out two invitation letters (“move better and feel better with online physical therapy”). A set of resistance bands, which I had never used in weight-training workouts before, and a yoga mat soon followed. I even got an electronic muscle- and nerve-stimulating device called Enso 3, once I had demonstrated that I was serious about the Hinge Health program.

“They’ve really dialed this in,” says Schmitz, 72, an author, retired journalist and self-described gym rat who’s endured a series of health challenges and now practices his Hinge Health exercises every day. “They’re giving you this stuff early on to really get the hook in. Mission accomplished.”

“It’s possible to retrain your pain system by considering all the factors that may contribute to your pain: sleep, stress, relationships and worries.”

Hinge Health mobile app, “Pain Is Your Protector”

Founded in 2014 and holding a “moderate buy” consensus rating on the New York Stock Exchange (HNGE), Hinge Health serves 1.5 million people through 2,350 client companies and over 50 health plans. The program focuses on musculoskeletal care, with the low back, knees, shoulders, neck and hips being the most common areas treated.

Given how strongly Blue Cross Blue Shield promoted the program, I found it odd that the company refused to comment for an article I wrote about Hinge Health in Next Avenue, an online magazine produced by Twin Cities PBS for people 50 and older. After being turned down for an interview, I asked the media relations team via email: “Could anyone explain how Blue Cross selects the clients to target for Hinge Health? For example, I got two unsolicited letters, possibly because I had used PT before.”

No response may indicate an answer. On November 21, two weeks before the open-enrollment period ends for 2026 Medicare plans, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota announced that “high cost pressures across all Medicare programs” were forcing the insurance giant to cut its SilverSneakers benefits at two of the Twin Cities’ most popular workout facilities, Life Time and YMCA of the North. The loss of free memberships will affect 26,000 seniors, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Even if Blue Cross discontinues its sponsorship of Hinge Health, I’ve learned enough to do the exercises on my own and to recognize that a home-based routine of physical therapy augments more rigorous workouts outdoors or at a health club.

Photo by Delaney Van on Unsplash

The program’s wholistic approach includes an emphasis on education. A new article appears at the end of each daily playlist focusing on sleep tips, mindful eating, building goals and habits, breathing and meditation, and mental health. One article features author and podcast star Brené Brown and “Atomic Habits” author James Clear describing how all-or-nothing perfectionism can undermine new habits. Instead, “plan for failure,” the article says. Don’t beat yourself up if you fall short of a particular goal. Reset, reevaluate and try again.

My biggest learning from Hinge Health is that the pain in my body gets fed in my brain. Emotions affect it, especially fear. I’ve learned how to carefully, mindfully move toward my shoulder pain (and my emotional pain, for that matter) rather than freezing up or backing away.

“Pain typically goes a lot deeper than the physical pain that someone’s in,” explains Dr. Mel, the PT with whom I work. “Knowing that pain is multifaceted, we encourage people to move. It’s often the best way to support healing.”

Maintaining health becomes more challenging and time-consuming as we age — whether building muscle mass and strengthening thinning bones or figuring out how to consume enough fiber and protein. Hinge Health asks members to articulate a North Star goal when they enroll. Mine is simple but not always easy: Keep moving well, and well into old age.