One morning this week I walked 22.5km. It was part of a personal fitness campaign that follows the fag end of Christmas and precedes a trekking holiday. Though I survived the walk, as the fingers hit the keyboard, it feels like my two legs will dislodge from my hips at any moment and splatter on the floor.

You may be one of the millions who have this morning declared a new year’s resolution to get fit. When I lived in the city, I was a regular visitor to the local gym. The morning aerobics or circuit class at a variety of gyms was just enough torture to make me feel virtuous. Sweating up the back of a class in a fetching 1980s leotard, I was Miss Clumsy trying to perfect the “grapevine” without plaiting my legs and falling flat on my face. It was mildly entertaining watching a variety of other shapes and sizes pumping iron in the other room while they secretly perved on the outline of their own biceps in a cyclone of mirrors. It never struck me as strange that all of us had driven to the gym to climb on to a step machine and hunch over it, legs whirring like so many rats in a wheel.

A relationship with a farmer and move to a farm meant my gym program went out the window. I had to find other ways to keep fit. Farmers just scratch their head at an indoor fitness routine. If you get up at the crack of dawn and drench a thousand sheep before morning tea, the idea of going to a gym would seem a little bizarre. Before Christmas I was roped in to help drench lambs, who are at their most skittish, having only been handled once or twice in their little lives. Drenching involves giving each lamb a dose of medicine into their mouths with a water-pistol-like gun, connected to a backpack full of drench. It’s a bit like giving the kindergarten kids their needles, and the lambs are equally nervous and excited.

In fitness terms, it involves bending over the the sheep queued in the race, hopefully holding your core muscles in to save your back, while grabbing the lamb around the snout and quickly shooting a dose down the side of its mouth. Depending on the nature of the individual, they stand meekly or fight like buggery, providing more exercise than the average gym class. While the farmer worked his way down his end of the race with the utmost calm and efficiency, drawing all creatures great and small into a hypnotic open-mouthed state, I was getting into a championship wrestling match with each and every animal. Those who resisted clamped their mouth closed like the most stubborn toddler resisting the choo-choo train spoon. A personal trainer might call it a mix of aerobics and strength training, with an odour a little stronger than the average weights room.

It reminded me that early on in our relationship, I was asked to help clean out the old flat-bottomed silos, which are used infrequently because they are so hard to empty. The remaining grain had gone mouldy and my job was to shovel it out a little hole one foot off the ground. Now there was the height of physical training, lifting weight while twisting, all at a stoop. Personal trainers around the world should have their clients in silos with a wide-mouth shovel pushing grain through a narrow door. As a good woman would, I gave him a lot of advice that day, notwithstanding his 40 years in the business and needless to say, he has been happy for me to work off-farm ever since.

But there are many other methods for getting fit on the land. A nearby farmer and representative polocrosse player parks further away from his shed than necessary and lugs 25kg bags of seed, dogfood and other farm supplies at a jog. No gym fees required.

A group of local men dubbed the Bash-Up Boys meet regularly on the oval rather than the local pub to keep their fitness up. The core group consists of a teacher’s aide, a council tradie, a builder and a farmer and the verbal sparring that goes on is as funny as any stand-up show. If you don’t make an effort, you will get a nickname like Sorbent. Soft.

They have devised a training cocktail which mixes their old football regimes with newer techniques torn out of health magazines to ensure they are thoroughly exhausted by the end of a session. The boys have dragged tractor tyres with ropes, run through virgin bush for days at a time and competed in marathons, triathlons and the occasional Tough Mudder. Aged between 30 and 50-something, they train all comers for free, mentoring teen boys in a healthy lifestyle. The young bulls are challenged to beat the old bulls. Age usually triumphs over beauty.

One of the most famous farmer training routines would have to be Cliff Young’s running program. The potato and sheep farmer shocked Australia when he won the Sydney-Melbourne ultra-marathon. He was the darkest of dark horses, at 61 running 875km on a vegetarian diet, to beat much younger runners. His training program involved chasing sheep in gumboots.

Running through the paddocks has some great advantages. Stepping out the back door, there is no one but livestock to watch you stumble into a rhythm. No fancy gym gear is required, only a decent pair of shoes (though they will be covered in poo before the end of your first run). Strike out at dawn and you run with the sound of birdsong and the individual voices of sheep. Cattle come up for a look at the weirdo in the daggy shorts. My canine running companions fan out ahead of me, making a nose map of all the lovely smelly things that happened in the night, rolling in the perfume of a rotting carcase or a pile of shit with a blissful smile on their furry faces. Snakes and grass seeds are the only hazards, or the soaking dew of a cold morning that leaves your socks soaking wet and cold.

When the children were small and mornings were not my own, I ran at night for a while. A circuit around the place took me to the highway where my bobbing head-torch in the dark night fascinated the passing traffic. Cars would slow to a crawl, no doubt speculating on the low flying UFO scanning a lonely paddock.

But as I approach a half century, I have taken to walking longer and running less to save my knees. A planned walking holiday has sparked a flurry of activity, going up the highest hills in the district to push the heart rate into stratospheric levels. And I have discovered a local walking group, with a range of interesting women who tramp the back roads through a nearby town every week. This is not an amble, they travel at pace and find the steepest grades to climb. I dragged a mate along and we met them early one morning – the two of us in our working gear, only to find our companions armed with walking poles and lycra. They took off at speed and we walked as fast as my little legs would carry me, talking all the way.

For someone who drives 50,000km a year, it struck me that walking is a great way to slow the world down, to take the time to see the details of each landscape and how it changes with every paddock. It becomes a meditation on nature. You notice everything at a walk, the burl of a tree, a sheep by a fence, the fall of the hill, a kangaroo-shaped log, the perfect rock buttocks. So my new year resolution is to slow down, walk longer, talk less and notice more.

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