Originally Posted by
Rsp29a
No. Walking is, in fact, strenuous activity. Let's breakdown the rule:
"If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity—at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity— the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it."
So, we have 2 things here:
1) "a period of strenuous activity"
So the information within the dashes of the main sentence indicate we're getting more information or better clarity on what the sentence is otherwise saying, that is, they're defining the otherwise undefined "period of strenuous activity." The meaning of the sentence doesn't change if we remove the dashes and the parenthetical statement; but it does give us the definition needed to determine the two undefined terms, that is, what is the time frame of the "period" and what is "strenuous activity?"
The period is defined as "at least one hour," while the strenuous activity is listed as "walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity."
I understand you want to read this as "walking for 1 hour" is the period of strenuous activity, but that just doesn't work as then the period is undefined for the rest of the examples: what's the period of fighting that resets a LR? We'd not know.
The only way to properly read the sentence is "a period [at least one hour] of strenuous activity [walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity]."
2) if the reading still isn't clear to you, Crawford has told us that the above reading from 1) is correct:
"Any amount of fighting breaks a short rest. A long rest can withstand an interruption of up to 1 hour. #DnD"
So we know both the RAI and the Official Rule is for LRs that [1 hour of walking] equals [1 hour of fighting].
So we know the rule is "a period [at least 1 hour] of strenuous activity [walking or fighting].
It's not difficult to see that this is how the rule works.