How I Learned to Walk

An Introduction

Introduction

I’ve started writing this whole blog thing, but never introduced who I was or what it was I am trying to do. Instead, I’ve just boldly dived into whatever topic I thought was important—indeed I was trying to figure out what topic is important by diving in.  This post is a bit of a step back, if you will.

So, an introduction.  

“Hi, I’m Chris, and I hope you’re having a really good day”.

“Hi”

This post is mostly about how I learned how to walk, and then a bit about what I am trying to do here. Like most people, I don’t remember learning to walk. Walking is a fundamental skill that we constantly use but can’t remember learning. As I understand it, one learns to walk by nearly falling repeatedly. Each step is a fall interrupted. Learning to walk is just not falling and then getting progressively more confident in it.

This post is mostly about the second time I learned to walk: How I learned that walking is an activity, how I learned that activity is an activity worth doing, and how I learned how to do that activity in the way I do it now. While the first learning to walk was quick, the second one has taken much longer. The process, somewhat like a walk, was slow and gradual, and I think the best way to explain it is to provide a biography of sorts.

How I Learned to Walk

As far as I can remember, I got the idea that walking was a good idea from Bill Bryson. As I child I listened to “A Walk in the Woods” Bryson’s bestseller which depicts him and Stephen Katz’s hapless adventures attempting to hike the Appalachian Trial, a task neither of them is quite up to. It was may be the first ‘adult’ book, in the sense that it had swear words in it, I ever listened to. Largely because of this, I enjoyed it very much. I then read Bryson’s other books. Notably, Neither here nor there, and Notes from a Small Island. These are travel books, but travel books are mostly not about traveling but arriving, and upon arriving anywhere Bryson seemed to spend most of his time walking around. It built a sense in me, that I’ve never quite shaken, that what one should do on a trip is just sort of walk about.

My parents also deserve some credit. I grew up in Colorado, which is a nice place to grow up, and my parents were keen hikers, my family would frequently go on hikes. As a child I would go, but not really by choice and without enthusiasm. I’ve never actually liked hiking much. Backpacking was even worse. Walking up mountains with a weighty backpack, only to have to sleep on uncomfortable ground while the rain poured down around you, never seemed like an obviously fun activity. As far as I could tell, there were two different weather conditions when it came to backpacking: rain, and mosquitoes. Suffice it to say, the parents had to frequently bribe me and my siblings up the trail with Skittles. “Come on, Chris, just get to the top of this hill and you can have a green one.”

In high school I would walk home from school regularly, about a half hour walk. I always walked the same route, usually listening to music (Rise Against, Thursday, Sage Francis) on my cd player, or my iPod mini¹. I don’t remember what I thought about these walks, though the route is forever burned into my memory. It was my first time I walked as a method of commuting (though not every day, and only in one direction). I’ve commuted by all the reasonable methods: bike, public transportation, car, and walking. An approximately 20-30 min walk is the best of the bunch, and I think it is correctly understood to be a bit of a luxury.

I was lucky enough to go to college in a beautiful place, and we would frequently play in the surrounding mountains. However, the walks I most remember from those years were the ones we took at night. My university backed up to a provincial park, and my friends and I would take frequent walks in the woods. It was part of how we became friends. The friends were unusually anxious people, and we had an unusually anxious college experience. Someone would get stressed or sad, or just need a break, and a small group, or just a couple of us, would go for a walk, usually late at night, often in the rain. We were uncertain young people walking under thousands of massive cedars with 100s of sq. km. of Canadian forest in front of us. Despite the potential for ursine encounters, the walks were soothing, especially after snow had fallen to help illuminate the way. We would come back calmer. If not entirely ready to face the world, at least ready to try.

After college I was here and there. I returned to Colorado and commuted to Auraria Campus on foot, a bit over an hour² .  My 20s were (as I suppose they often are) not the best years. I moved to a bigger city for a bigger city job that I quit within months. Unrooted, with few friends, and single, I often found myself just walking about the city by myself. Without planning it, without even really noticing that it had happened, it became what I did. Sometimes it was a way to listen to books, sometimes it was a way to acquaint myself with a new place, sometimes it was a way to get somewhere. Often it was all those things at once. More than that, it was a way to be in the world, without having to be in the world.  A way to travel through and be present at the same time. Whatever it was, it worked for me, and I kept doing it. I moved cities again and chose my new apartment largely because it was such a great spot to walk from. And it was a great spot to walk from, one direction brought you to a large urban park, another to a happening street, another to water. All different, and all excellent. It was a beautiful city to walk in.

I spent my free time largely walking. I found myself with a couple of months between the end of my work and the start of my Ph.D. program and I spent most of it walking. I took a short trip down the west coast and spent my days walking around Portland and San Francisco, both new places for me. The rest of it I spent walking around the city where I lived, a brilliant summer. It was during this time I first thought about walking as something to share, something to write about. I jotted down a few things, but never really went anywhere with it. I moved back to the Midwest, back to more school (somehow). PHDing is busy, but flexible, and I would walk every day.

In the last year or so, I’ve started going for long weekend walks. Or really, I started going for regular Saturday walks and then they just kept getting longer. They now take up most of the day. The distance started to add something to the experience. I am now traveling far enough that I have to really think about it. I need to plan routes, or at least look at a map, think about the best way to cross highways. It heightened the sense of adventure as well. I could set out with a mild plan, and then head out into the outside having to figure out how to get back. When I arrived home, it was with legs that were pleasantly tired, and a sense of accomplishment. Each walk I went somewhere I hadn’t walked before, my own sense of the place I lived expanding.

The Benefits

It also became clear I was, if not the only person doing this, at least among a pretty small group. I don’t know how many people in America spend their weekends walking out the front door, walking ten or fifteen or twenty miles around the city, only to return home, but it isn’t many. The data on how much Americans walk isn’t great, but we clearly don’t do it very much. Mostly people aren’t outside at all. Residential streets are empty, with only delivery people and the occasional dogwalker. Walking seems to have become an activity that you travel to. I felt like walking generally, but also in the way I was walking, I had discovered a secret activity that not enough other people were doing. It also became clear to me that they are missing out. That you, personally, are missing out.

Most writing that I’ve seen extolling the virtues of walking, highlights it as a low impact way to get some exercise. Good for reasons of health, fitness, and weight loss. This is probably true as far as it goes, though I suspect walking is an inefficient way to exercise if your goal is to lose weight. In my experience “walking is much more important than exercise”³.

Aside from its moderate physical benefits, walking makes me a smarter and happier person.  Smarter because walking is among the best times for thinking, my brain seems to work better when moving⁴. I learn a lot while walking. I do most of my reading (that isn’t technical enough to require a graph) while walking, walking is the 2^nd best activity for listening to an audiobook⁵. If I didn’t walk, I would read fewer than half the books I do now. Walking has given me a better understanding of the place where I live, both in a more visceral way of understanding how the city works, and simply by seeing the world firsthand.  Walking lets me be outside in nature, and while I am still hopeless at identifying plants, at least it gives me a reason to try to improve.

Walking makes me a happier person. Walking is somehow both calming and energizing, I almost always, really almost always, return from a walk in a better mood than I set off it. Walking gives me time to reflect and have mental conversations with myself. Walking is a much better time to do self-assessments then lying awake at 2am is. Walking is also a physically pleasant and comfortable activity (in contrast to most other forms of exercise), and when you are done with a long walk the shower feels amazing, and the beer tastes great.

Trust me, this is something worth doing. I really think a regular walking practice will make you something like 10-20 percent happier⁶. This for an activity that requires no equipment, no training, no expense, and almost no planning.

This Project

In the last year or so have I started taking practice (a word I like for walking) as something I should take seriously. This has taken a few forms. The first has been reading about walking⁷, The second is this blog. The third is an attempt to create a walking map of my city, or at least of my walks in it.

The blog part has a few goals. One is to push back on the idea that America is unwalkable (a term I largely dislike) while engaging with the reality that much of the experience of walking in America is grappling with poor walking conditions (a term I like much more). While I will sometimes discuss public policy and ways that walking infrastructure could be improved, I hope this project will largely deal with walking in America as it is, not how I might wish it to be. 

I hope this project can provide guidance and inspiration to those who are taking their first steps into walking. For more experienced pedestrians I hope it can also serve as a jumping off point for what would make walking in America better and more fun. I would also love to hear from you about your own pedestrian adventures: if you have any thoughts for topics, please let me know.

Happy Walking!

-Chris

1. This sentence dates me exactly.

2. I would take the bus back, which felt much longer. especially if it was the 15

3. I’m pretty sure is a quote, which is why its in quotes. But I forget where from.

4. A Jean-Jacques Rousseau quote that expresses the same sentiment: “I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”

5. Top five audiobook listening activities: 1) Driving across Kansas, 2) walking, 3) putting away laundry, 4) Cooking, 5) Driving (but not across Kansas)

6. I made this number up, expect a future post on the scientific literature on this.

7. A book list will be forthcoming.