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| Aristotle (right, with Plato) was the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy, which advocated walking from place to place while teaching. If it's good enough for Aristotle, it's good enough for you. |
“Walking is man’s best medicine.”---Hippocrates
“If you seek creative ideas. go walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.”---Raymond Inmon
From birth to age 55, I had the good fortune to be naturally thin. I have no idea why, it seems to be an aberration in my family. Neither my mother nor my father were particularly svelte and neither of my two sisters will be mistaken for Twiggy. While maintaining a lean profile is desirable for most, it behooves anyone who desires to be an athlete to carry a little weight. I discovered this one day when I was 12 years old and tackled a fellow named Paul Higgins on a kickoff runback. True, Higgins (who was often mistaken for Mt. Kilimanjaro) went flying but I crumpled to the ground in a heap, barely able to drag myself off the field. “Nice tackle,” said Paul, ever the gentleman, but I barely noticed. I was busy checking myself for broken bones and possible hearing loss.
After that, I tried to gain weight. I ate a lot of soup, doubled my lunch, encouraged my mother to buy more ice cream. Nothing worked. I hit a lot of singles and doubles while bigger guys smacked home runs. I took heart from Ted Williams---“The Splendid Splinter”---who seemed skinny as a rail but could hit the ball to Yugoslavia. Ted said it was all in the eyes, claimed he could actually see the ball hit the bat. I tried that a couple of times and decided that Williams must be from outer space. I figured if I couldn’t play for the Red Sox, maybe I could write about them. Fortunately for me, newspapermen came in all sizes.
I stayed thin for a very long time, but then at age 29 had a severe asthma attack and wound up in the hospital for five days. When I finally got out, my doctor prescribed prednisone and phenobarbital, which I took for a few months until my pharmacist advised against further use and directed me to an allergist who set me on a better course. In the meantime, however, I had ballooned up to 177 pounds, 25 over my fighting weight. An old friend I hadn’t seen in two years spotted me on the street one day and gawked, “Bill---is that you---you look like shit!” This sort of thing will often cause a fellow to make an immediate reassessment of his circumstances.
I ordered a pair of those rubber trunks, which fit tight as a drum from navel to thigh and make you sweat like Chris Christie. Three days of this medieval torture later, I donated them to the Poorhouse of the Fat. Once off prednisone, the extra pounds melted away and I remained trim until I rounded the corner toward age 55. At that point, my weight was virtually the same, but my stomach experienced a growth spurt. I had night sweats about becoming one of those guys whose big stomachs cause their pants to slide down over their normal-sized butts, like my friend, Dan Iannarelli. There was only one solution. I would have to start going to a gym, a thought which rarely causes dancing in the streets. For some reason, I harked back to Tennyson’s old quote, “Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.” Resolutely, I joined the Lifetime Fitness Center in Ocala in an attempt to hold the Maginot Line.
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| Teddy Roosevelt, champion of the national parks with all-star hiker John Muir |
Gym Dandy
I was never much of a gym guy, even though Joe Cirulli launched his Gainesville Health & Fitness empire in a tiny storefront just a half-block from the Subterranean Circus on West University Avenue. I knew gyms could be too much of a good thing when power-hitting Ted Kluszewski of the Cincinnati Reds became muscle-bound, lost the flow of his natural swing and went into a batting slump. Ted was a workout addict. An intervention was arranged and Ted laid off the weights for awhile and returned to normal. It’s a good thing Superman never played baseball.
At the Lifetime Center, I started each day with a 45-minute walk & run, building up the speed as I ran. After a few months, a marathon runner named Christie Kay asked me to run on the treadmill beside hers to help her keep the desired pace. After warming up, we would run five minutes at 8.5 mph, then five more at 10 mph, then back to 8.5, etc. Needless to say, there was not much of a conversation going on as we jogged. This experience taught me several things, the chief one being that I never wanted to be a marathon runner. But more important, that once you were able to develop the stamina to run 10 miles an hour, you could drop down to 8.5 and run all day. Not that anyone but crazy marathon people would actually want to.
I soon came to realize the value of the cardio part of the workout. The gym trainers put everyone on the treadmills first to warm up their muscles and only then had them move on to the weights. The newbies who came in for lifting only never lost an ounce, while the cardio enthusiasts enjoyed a slow decrease. One day, a burly character went up to a trainer and complained, “I’m working my ass off here and I can’t get a sixpack.”
“And you never will,” answered the trainer, “if you don’t do cardio.”
Age and heart issues cut down on my speed, but I stayed on the treadmill three days a week for 25 years until Lifetime closed in early Spring of 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 blues. Running on pavement is an invitation to knee problems, so I decided to walk a 15-minute mile each morning on the street outside our property in Fairfield. Siobhan, who gets little exercise due to the nature of her business, decided to tag along with me. For 12 months now, we’ve been walking six days a week with few problems. Sometimes its very hot, sometimes it’s cold, occasionally it drizzles, but neither rain nor snow nor fear of erratic drivers can slow these walkers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. At the end of the walk, we are energized, wide-awake, ready to start the day. You can do it, too. No excuses. Okay, people with balance issues and compromised limbs can use roller skates, but that’s it.
He Walks The Line
When you drive through an area, you are under the impression you’ve seen it. This is a laughable delusion to a walker who once shared the same opinion. One of the reasons I have always felt close to 1962 Austin is that my vehicle was disabled there and I walked through its streets daily, passing houses, apartments and businesses whose inhabitants inevitably shared their private conversations with wandering nomads, where delicious aromas seeped out the doorways of imperfect Tex-Mex restaurants and cascading wisteria greeted your approach.
The long-distance walker knows the soul of a city, hears the sighs and celebrations of its people, observes how an impoverished barrio morphs in a few blocks into a beehive of industry, then a respectable row of apartments, eventually a cluster of trendy boutiques and bistros. He knows where to get the morning paper, what time the hot doughnuts are ready, who stays open late and which laggards don’t show up til noon. He is a part of it all, far more than a mere vehicle could ever be, swapping cheery greetings with the shopkeepers, stopping to buy a rose from the orphan on the corner, teasing the old man who sells newspapers, pretending to faint at the sight of a pretty woman. The world is his oyster, this walker, and why wouldn’t it be? It dives into his pores, provides a beat to his walk, puts a smile on his face, a grin no automobilist could ever know. He is not just marching to get someplace, he is walking to be somewhere. He knows a secret shared by few. Sometimes the thought of it makes him sing.
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| The Atlantic City boardwalk, 1938. People walked in 1938. |
It’s A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood
Siobhan and I know a lot more about our neighbors than we used to prior to our walking days. We know who owns the most energetic dogs, what days the garbage trucks come for which neighbors, who spends the most hours mowing his little patch of land. We know that ex-jockey Ernesto is a more than competent fence-builder. We know the dour sheep on the corner lot need a party. We know who voted for Trump and who for Biden.
One morning, we saw evidence of voter frustration. Truck tire prints on the grass afront one residence suggested someone had aimed for a lingering Biden sign, missed and skwushed the nearby mailbox to death. Not one to be easily deterred, the elderly gentleman who owned the place had the mailbox up in a few hours. Just for spite, the Biden signs remain there today, pristine and smirking at dissident passersby.
Another neighbor who once worked for Siobhan was at her front gate a couple of mornings after the election. We hadn’t seen her in a while, so Siobhan invited her over for a drink. She accepted smilingly, but a few hours later called to say she refused to join in celebrating Biden’s victory and Siobhan’s “awful Socialist agenda.” She wouldn’t know a Socialist from a trapeze artist, so who’s kidding who? We don't see her much any more.
One fellow stopped us to ask Siobhan about his dog’s tumor. The new neighbor across the street, also a walker, introduced herself and mentioned she was in real estate, in case we needed any. People pass and wave, slow their cars down to share an encouraging word or impart some less than critical piece of information. One day, we noticed with glee that all the potholes had been filled. A repairman suddenly showed up today to work on a place that looked abandoned. The giant cranes who daily traverse the neighborhood are missing today, perhaps relatives are visiting from out of town. The walker alone knows these things. He will discover more tomorrow.
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| Walk like an Egyptian. Or walk like a Bolivian. Just walk. |
The Surprising Benefits Of Walking
1. Walking counters the effects of weight-promoting genes. Harvard researchers looked at 32 obesity-promoting genes in over 12,000 people to determine how much these genes actually contributed to body weight. They discovered that among the study participants who walked briskly for about an hour a day, the effects of those genes were cut in half.
2. Walking eases joint pain. Several studies have found that walking reduces arthritis-related pain and that walking five to six miles a week can even prevent arthritis from forming in the first place. Walking protects the joints---especially the knees and hips, which are most susceptible to osteoarthritis---by lubricating them and strengthening the muscles that support them.
3. Walking boosts immune function. Walking can help you during cold and flu season. A study of over 1000 men and women found that those who walked at least 20 minutes a day at least five days a week had 43% fewer sick days than those who exercised once a week or less. And if they did get sick, it was for a shorter duration and their symptoms were milder.
4. Walking Increases Creativity. A Stanford University study found that creativity in a person rises while they walk and for a short time after they finish. Both indoor and outdoor walkers were included. Many people contended that they came up with all their best ideas while walking. Even Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs held meetings with their associates while walking.
5. Walking slows the aging process. Findings from the longest running clinical trial on the link between walking and aging showed that walking is one of the most effective ways to avoid loss of mobility, which is often followed by aging. Researchers at McMaster University in Ontario also found that exercise keeps the skin tighter and even reverses the aging process. The types of exercise that proved the most beneficial were walking and Tai-Chai, since they both help avoid dementia.
Disa And Data
Walking is the most popular form of exercise in the United States. The average human walking speed is 3.1 miles per hour. A typical pair of tennis shoes will get you 500 walking miles. Walking 6000 steps a day will help improve health, but it takes 10,000 steps to lose weight. The average person walks 65,000 miles in his or her lifetime, the equivalent of walking three times around the Earth but much more boring. Walking increases blood flow to the brain and improves your mood but excess walking will not make you giddy. Walking for 10 miles every week instead of driving would eliminate 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year. Walking an extra 20 minutes a day will burn 7 pounds of body fat per year.
Get going, you geezers. If we don’t see some improvement soon, we’ll have to start you ballroom dancing. And nobody but Nancy Kay wants that.
That’s all, folks….
The Best
We continue today with the third in our series, The Best Day Of Your Life.
Best Day: Jeff Goldstein, Gainesville, Florida
April 25, 1976 was a warm day in Gainesville, Florida and the west stands at Florida Field (the only ones we were allowed to use) were filled to the brim with restless fans waiting to see Bob Dylan. The roadies and concert staff were swarming all over the field and stage, fussing over last-minute preparations. Finally, a hush fell over the crowd and a skinny guy with white hair ambled out on stage and grabbed the microphone. Emulating Ed Sullivan, he deadpanned, “We have a rilly big she-owe for you today. We got McGuinn. We got Baez. We got Dylan. But here’s the guy you’ve all been waiting for!” It was that wild and crazy guy, Steve Martin, introducing Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Steve had been in town for a performance of his own the previous night and hung around just for the hell of it. Kinky promptly opened with “Asshole From El Paso.”
Next up was Roger McGuinn and an epic Eight Miles High, then Joan Baez, who started with a song to Dylan, Diamonds and Rust. Deferring to the neighborhood, she later added The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. After Joan finished her set and the requisite waiting period had passed, Bob Dylan strolled slowly on the stage, head down with an acoustic guitar in his hand, not giving a whit of acknowledgement to the audience. Classic showmanship. The huge crowd was hushed, absolute silence, you could have heard a joint drop. Then, the opener….Blowin’ In The Wind. Like McGuinn and Baez before him, Dylan added his sidemen one by one, each doing a solo. Soon McGuinn and Baez joined Dylan and the three of them ran through hit after classic Dylan hit. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott showed up, Scarlet Rivera was there. Bob Neuwirth assembled the backup musicians, which included T Bone Burnett, Mick Ronson, David Mansfield, Steven Soles, Rob Stoner and Howie Wyeth. It was the Best Concert and maybe the Best Day Of My Life. And I was fortunate enough to be the producer of it all. Some days are precious gems, some days are stones. April 25, 1976 was my Hope Diamond.
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| Jeff Goldstein as a 1970s hippie above; Jeff Goldstein as a respectable 2021 citizen below. The only thing different is the hair. |
