Our coverage of Walk@Lunch Day started March 23 with a heads up,  resumed last week with a look at why you should walk over your lunch hour, picked back up yesterday with a look at the logistics of taking a walk at lunch, and continues today with a reminder that walking at lunch shouldn’t just be a workout, it should be an adventure.

Years ago I had a typical desk job, glued to a computer screen in a gray bullpen in a windowless room. Could there possibly be a more bleak work environment? I wondered as I often contemplated how far one could throw a computer terminal from a third-floor office window. I started walking at lunch less for the exercise than to relieve the tedium of the day. Often, the prospect of my noon walk was what kept me plugging along.

But after a while, even my noon walk became mired in tedium and I eventually figured out why: I was doing the same two-mile route over and over. Passing the same uninspired downtown architecture (my route took me past the state government complex in downtown Raleigh) was better than eating at my desk, but it wasn’t the escape I craved. Walking at lunch, I discovered, is as much about the escape as the exercise. You do it to get away from the familiar, from the mundane, from the routine. Substituting one same-old same-old with another won’t return you to work energized and refreshed.

For some of you, this isn’t an issue. If you work at SAS at its Cary headquarters, for instance, you have a network of walking trails out your office door. Likewise, if you work in Research Triangle Park, where 14 miles of jogging/pedestrian trail wind through RTP’s 7,000 acres. Most of us, though, need to get more creative with our routes. Here’s what I did.

First, I decided that 30 minutes wasn’t enough time for either the escape I craved or the aerobic boost I needed. So I awarded myself an hour for lunch (to be made up with an extra half hour tacked on at day’s end). Then I cut a circle out of cardboard, marked it with the points of the compass and fashioned a needle. Just before heading out, I’d spin the needle: Whichever direction it came to rest on was the direction I would walk that day. Thirty minutes out, 30 minutes back.

My noon walk became an hour-long adventure. The four prime coordinates took me to four distinct worlds.

North meant a trip past the hideous state government complex to the old Mordecai neighborhood. Much as I love a walk in the forest, it’s hard to beat walking through a gentrified neighborhood and checking out the home improvements.

West took me to the warehouse district. Today, this is a happening area in downtown’s reviving nightlife scene; back then, it was pretty much just that: a warehouse district where brick buildings, most abandoned and little changed from a half century earlier, made you feel like you’d been plunked down in the pages of a gritty Mickey Spillane thriller.

South took in a massive grain processing plant and smaller industrial operations, many with intricate mechanical workings that, from the street and observed through a left brain, resembled Rube Goldberg creations.

East was my favorite. East took me into older residential neighborhoods were people still hung out on porches, talked to their neighbors, took time to enjoy life. The perfect social antidote for a morning spent staring at a screen.

Every day was a surprise. And because the world isn’t simply divided into North, South, East and West, but northwest, north-northwest and west-northwest as well, the routes rarely repeated. If it appeared they might, all the more incentive to pick up the pace and explore even farther.

I learned a lot about the neighborhood I worked in on those lunchtime walks. I also lost some weight, got some sun and improved my odds at a longer, healthier life.

Most important? I never discovered how far one could throw a computer terminal from a third-floor office window.