How I Became A Walking Fanatic

A chance discover of a 19th-century celebrity walker changed my life. I couldn't be happier.

By Wayne Curtis May 14, 2015 0 Comments

Maybe it was because on hot days he lined his hat with ice-filled cabbage leaves. Maybe it was the way he’d sometimes walk backward down hills because it was easier on his thigh muscles. Or maybe it was because he bathed his feet in whiskey to “harden” them, an act he believed reduced blisters. However it happened, Edward Payson Weston—possibly the greatest walker ever to stride across the surface of the earth—managed to capture and hold my attention.
Weston was born in 1839 and died in 1929. In 1868, he became the first American to walk 100 miles in less than 24 hours. He later did something people believed impossible by walking 550 miles in six days, and then he walked 5,000 miles in 100 days. In 1909, he walked from New York to San Francisco in 105 days, averaging 38 miles per day. He turned 70 years old the day he left Manhattan.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB HOWARD

I first stumbled upon a mention of Weston some years ago while scanning through microfilm in a library basement. I found myself reading one of his 1909 dispatches in the New York Times, which documented his cross-country walk. I glanced at it, thought, “Hmmm, interesting,” and scrolled on. But sometime later the significance of his accomplishment caught up with me: 38 miles a day? For more than 100 days? At age 70? I read the article again, and in time I developed a mild obsession about the man with a few idiosyncrasies and many accomplishments. I eventually wrote a book about his great walk, much encouraged by my wife, who believed this might get me to stop talking about him.

Weston became the first American to walk 100 miles in under 24 hours.

In the course of the researching and writing, I learned a lot about walking. And one of the things I learned was that just about everything I thought I knew about walking was wrong.
When I was younger, I was a pretty regular walker. Even before I turned 10, I liked to walk the mile along fields and through forest from my school bus stop to our house. I would set off on treks of several miles in the woods in my teens. In my 20s, I took up backpacking. I spent hours poring over maps, imagining views from New England mountaintops. Topographic lines fascinated me the way scrimmage lines fascinated other guys. Like most serious hikers, I also spent a lot of time thinking about things like reducing pack weight. Did I really need that additional blade on the Swiss Army knife, or should I get a lighter model? Were flow-through tea bags too heavy to carry along? Walking, as I understood it, involved lots of planning and thus was something I did apart from my unplanned regular life, where I got around by car. Walking became something like a scuba-diving vacation or a trip to a ski resort—an event that needed to be scheduled in advance and strategized exhaustively.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB HOWARD

No wonder I felt such a strong sense of kinship with Weston. I related to his obvious love of logistics. He usually knew how far he’d walk and where he was going before he set out. He carefully tended to his equipment; a support car followed him for the first third of his 1909 walk, ferrying things like extra boots and the tea and raw eggs he mixed together to gulp while walking. After the driver abandoned him outside Chicago, he walked along rail lines, convincing freight companies to let him leapfrog his gear ahead by train.
At the same time, Weston’s achievements bewildered me. How could anyone walk so far and so long? I tried several times while working on my book to complete a “Weston,” which is what I came to call a 38-mile day. And I did so on terrain far more forgiving than the rutted, muddy roads Weston endured. Doing laps on smooth pavement around a shady park in New Orleans, and later along a firm, flat footpath that encircled a tidal cove in Maine, I found that I could comfortably walk 16 to 18 miles in a day. But then, eventually chafing, I’d grow powerfully uninterested and give it up. Of course, Weston had a destination and an ever-changing vista to help keep him motivated. I was simply walking in circles. With paving has come the interstate traffic that’s made it treacherous to venture forth on foot as he did.
Still, Weston’s example gradually rubbed off on me. I started to walk more and more on a daily basis. I bought a wrist pedometer and began tracking my step count. I embraced the notion of notching up 10,000 steps every day, which is about five miles. I liked that I could accomplish this in bits and pieces: a little in the morning, a little in the afternoon, and maybe a stroll in the evening if my gadget informed me I was falling down on the job. Before long, I had more or less abandoned mountain hiking and instead had become an avid urban walker. And the more I walked, the more I realized that my longtime perception of walking as something done apart from everyday life was misbegotten.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB HOWARD

In my research, I learned that walking is, in fact, what makes us human. Walking upright—something our ancestors started doing some 5 million years ago—was the first fork in the road toward becoming who we are today. Researchers into hominid bipedalism point out all sorts of effects. It shaped our bodies, with their muscular backsides and stacked spines; it helped enlarge our brains, and it freed up our hands, enabling technology.
While nobody knows how many miles early humans would walk simply to survive—to hunt, to forage for food, to move to better locales during seasonal migrations, to flee—research suggests that we once walked 5 to 10 miles a day, every day. That’s no longer the case. The machinery that bipedalism fostered came to curtail our walking. Americans now walk about 2.5 miles daily—from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the parking lot to the grocery store.

Walking was the first fork in the road toward becoming who we are today. It shaped our bodies and our brains.

The upshot is both surprising and not. Childhood obesity has more than doubled (and quadrupled among adolescents) over the past 30 years, and more than one in three American adults are obese. That’s not startling. But the breadth and range of disorders caused from too little walking is. Many studies have found that much of the rise in chronic diseases—type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, and many cancers—can be linked to physical inactivity over the past century.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB HOWARD

It wouldn’t take much for most of us to get back on our feet. For me, it involved just a modest change in mind-set and behavior. When I’m at home in New Orleans, if I’m headed to the crowded French Quarter, I park a mile away and walk the rest of the way. This helps me prepare mentally for what’s ahead and to decompress afterward, and I feel more lithe and limber throughout. (Plus, the parking is free or cheaper.) When in unfamiliar cities, walking once seemed an invitation to getting hopelessly lost. But with a smartphone, detailed directions and distances are a few taps away. It feels ameliorative when technology actually enables my walking, and I invariably learn much about the city and its people and history when exploring it on foot.
The greater challenge these days can be finding a place to walk. Over the past century, we’ve engineered a habitat around us—strip malls and roads without sidewalks and great distances between basic services—that makes walking difficult if not impossible. We’ve created an environment that denies us a core aspect of our humanity. Not that this can’t be corrected. We’ve lately seen city planners, in Seattle, New York, and elsewhere, attempt to restore walking to the center of civic life. Myriad benefits follow, including more vibrant downtowns and improved public health.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB HOWARD

Am I healthier now that I walk more every day? I think so. Am I happier? I know that if I miss out on walking for a few days, I feel foggy and tend to be more cranky. The inverse is also, apparently, true: Clinical studies in 1999 at Duke University showed that after 16 weeks, moderate exercise like brisk walking was just as effective at reducing the symptoms of depression as Zoloft.
My creative work, too, has benefited from walking. Walking helps to free up some room in my mind, which can push me off in new directions. Most of the day, my multiple electronics—smartphone, tablet, laptop—surround me like a small army of Pac-Mans, burbling and beeping and gobbling up my time with tasks. When walking, even briefly on a minor mission, I leave them behind if I can, allowing my thoughts to roam, and ideas surface more easily and interconnect more promiscuously than when I’m captive to a chair.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB HOWARD

I’m not alone in recognizing this. Many of the most creative people throughout history were noted walkers. Henry David Thoreau was often afoot; he liked to walk 10 to 20 miles at a go. His essay on walking resulted in what’s arguably his most famous phrase: “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.” Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo were inveterate walkers, as were Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth (“I love a public road: few sights there are/That please me more”). Modern-day creative Steve Jobs liked to walk during serious conversations with others; so does Mark Zuckerberg. And the link between creative thinking and walking isn’t merely anecdotal: A pair of Stanford University researchers ran a series of experiments in creativity, testing students while they were seated, walking indoors on a treadmill, and then again, walking outdoors. Whether inside or out, scores were higher when feet were moving.

Walking helps to free up some room in my mind, which can push me off in new directions.

There are so many benefits to walking that I’ve started thinking of getting about by foot as “slow transit,” just as many have embraced “slow food.” Walking knits us more tightly to the world around us. We evolved to process information at the speed of walking: We notice details, maneuver through crowds, make fleeting contact with others, all quite naturally. About 20 mph—around the top speed at which we can run—is the maximum speed at which drivers can make eye contact with pedestrians, enhancing cooperation at intersections. Any faster than that, like when we’re speeding along a highway, and we navigate by signals and shared rules instead, removing ourselves from more-intimate communication. The walker’s world is fine-grained and rich in detail, in contrast to the monotony of interstate highways, with their oversized signs and simple geometry. When I walk, I start to notice the leafing trees and the wrought-iron lampposts, a bird alighting, the faces of passersby. I bring stories to those faces. I write in my mind, and the sentences take the rhythm of my gait.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB HOWARD

Of course, I haven’t given up driving, just as I haven’t given up potato chips. But I’ve started thinking of driving as the empty calories of mobility, something that’s immediately rewarding but provides little long-term sustenance.
In chasing down Weston through his past and across the country, the chief lesson I learned is that walking is not something we do. It’s who we are. By now, I’ve stopped thinking of walking as a special event that has to be scheduled into my life. Walking isn’t a mountaintop on the horizon, something you strive to ascend during summer break. Walking, like life, is what happens in between.