ICYMI: Can You Walk as Much as this 'Senior Senior' New Canaan Woman?

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the past week. We’re republishing it here in case you missed it:

Are you too tired, achey or busy to get a healthy amount of exercise in each week? Take a look at what Elaine Kilbourn, a New Canaan resident and an office administrator in Darien Town Hall, does just about every work day:

She walks from Town Hall down Park Place to Noroton Avenue, then walks to Ledge Road, then walks down that road to the Post Road, then under the highway and down the Post Road to Renshaw Avenue, where she walks back (uphill) to Town Hall.

Her five-days-a-week walk comes out to about 2.4 miles (or 2.3 miles, according to Google Maps — here’s a map of it). The walk takes up two-thirds of Kilbourn’s hour-long lunch break, nearly every Monday through Friday.

Darien Health Director David Knauf said he went to Whole Foods to get lunch one day and was amazed to see his elderly colleague walking by. When she isn’t walking, Kilbourn works as office administrator for both the Health Department and town Human Services Department — the first person someone sees when they come in.

Knauf said he’s so astounded at how much exercise she gets in that he’s got her using a mobile phone app that tracks her walking mileage. Knauf intends to post her daily mileage on a new Health Department account on Twitter Monday through Friday, as a way of encouraging others to exercise (he is, after all, the town health director). He hopes to start tweeting as early as next week.

“We’re issuing a challenge: Can you do this? Can you keep up with Elaine?” he says.

Knauf says he’ll regularly tweet her daily mileage and encourage others to tweet what exercise they did that day. He wants to challenge others to see if they can get in as much exercise as Kilbourn gets in a given day, or a typical day, and how long they can keep it up.

Kilbourn got started with her walks three years ago when one of her grandsons was getting married. She wanted to lose some weight before the wedding. Originally, she went only as far as Hecker Avenue (parallel to Ledge Road and on the other side of Interstate 95).

She walks through the winter, except when it’s raining or it’s just too cold. She admits that she walks on the street if the sidewalks aren’t plowed.

“It makes me feel good,” she said, so she stuck with it. “I’m by myself, and I can just think of things and remember things.”

That’s a kind of change of pace for her workday: In her job, among other things, she’s answering phones and welcoming people to the office. (“You have to tell people how pleasant she is to everybody,” Inta Adams, assistant human services director, says in a stage whisper during a break in an interview with Kilbourn. “No matter how nasty they are!”)

Kilbourn is a grandmother seven times over and she has five adult children. She’s old enough to have graduated from Darien High School when it was located in the building she now works at (back then she was on the DHS volleyball and field hockey teams). She now lives in New Canaan with her husband, Joe, who retired two years ago.

And just how old is she?

“Old enough to know better,” she replied, “young enough to learn.”