It's as if there's a trending internet tale that walking will keep the virus away, and it will at least keep at bay for a while the stress of being locked up and until this week locked up with children especially. Maybe family walking will become the new jogging, and maybe walking with children will replace walking with a bottle of water. We could do a lot worse.

Jogging has come and largely gone, squash departed as suddenly as it arrived, calisthenics in parks had a brief heyday, boot camps seem to be on the wane, steroid-pumped exhibitionism lingers, gyms are closed, and cycling is the new paraphernalia pursuit.

Through it all people have walked and there are more now than ever.

People walk for many reasons, and I came across a sad one a few years ago when I spoke with a distant neighbour who seemed suddenly to be walking whenever I saw him. Was he, I asked, on a fitness kick? Sort of, he told me. He'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and his doctor had told him that exercise would delay the progression, so he'd been walking all day every day since. A year later I realised I hadn't seen him walking for a week or so and I never saw him again.

Anyway, while so many others have started exercising during isolation I've stopped exercising. When we read that cycling in the stream of another cyclist was a significant virus risk my cycling mates and I paused our 90-minute excursions and three months later the pause has become a stop.

And even before the gyms closed my wife had stopped me going because, she said, of the risk of picking up the virus from surfaces.

One of the reasons I'd exercised almost daily for 37 years was that not exercising for more than a couple of days would leave me out of sorts. I'd be lethargic, irritable and insatiably hungry, and my mind would be cloudy. On the days I exercised I felt energetic, happy and sharp, and eating enough was enough. But after three months of torpor and with winter weighing more each day I feel absolutely fine about not getting up at 5.50am, and I suspect winter is going to prevail this year.

I had never deliberately exercised when I started exercising daily with a Cooks Hill neighbour in 1983, and within weeks I'd realised that exercise was changing my life.

Changing it for the better, even if it didn't feel that way getting out of bed at 6am. I say now that daily exercising ranks fourth in positive impact on my life, behind marriage, children and work.

After two weeks of riding old bikes to a Hamilton South oval and trotting around its track, my neighbour Ken and I included a swim at Merewether Ocean Baths, and so began for me 20 years of running the beach and swimming a kilometre six days a week.

My training mates and I did it in all weather all year, and I marvel that we did. Some winter mornings now I shudder at the thought of dipping a toe.

Ken, by the way, was a Newcastle City Council manager and I used to enjoy the fact that for quite a while he was under baseless suspicion for providing me with confidential council reports, which I drew upon often as a Newcastle Herald reporter. He didn't enjoy that experience quite as much I did.

Then, in 2003, I took up cycling and retired the run-swim when running seemed suddenly to be doing more harm than good, and cresting the first 100 hills was harder than anything I'd ever done running or swimming.

It did improve but only marginally.

For years my riding mates and I would do one or two long rides a year, often riding for days through bush, and my memories of those rides are among the most valuable volumes in my mental library. We continued to ride, until three months ago.

As important as the experience and the physical benefit has been the people. Everyone who strips to nylon swimmers and dives into water at 14 degrees is a character worth knowing, and I hope I'll never forget them.

Merv Gill the wharfie, who used to pass around a thermos of Bonox and rum, and the unerringly cheerful Clive Hogan, who would often express the hope that we never break the female mould. The booming Stanley Allanson, who could rage like no other. Hundreds among the dawn patrol at Merewether baths over the years.

Then there are the people I've trained with. They more than me have been the reason I've kept it up.

Until recently, that is.

There was Ken, and when he moved to Tasmania and I moved west there was Gary as we'd drive ourselves up Cardiff's hills, then back near the beach there was John and Don and Roger and Frank and Renita and a dozen more.

There is another side to the exercise story, as was pointed out to me 20 years ago by this paper's then pictorial editor, David Wicks. Not one of the many centenarians he'd photographed at their 100th shindig, he told me, had attributed their long life to exercise.

I'd been involved in the news cover of new centenarians for almost as many years as David and, instantly, I knew he was right. They'd mention apple cider vinegar, daily prayer, porridge, a tipple a day or total abstinence, hard work, but not one had ever mentioned exercise. Not even walking.

I'll bear that in mind in bed.