Walking

 Today, I walked for some 2 hours (with a 5-10 minute break and plenty of brief pauses to sightsee) around the Central West End (St. Louis, MO), for around 4 1/2 miles, certainly one of the longest walking sprees I've taken. Though my legs were passing tired when I got back, they aren't sore, though I don't feel soreness until the next day, so we'll see. When I lived in St. Jacob, there were a couple years when I would walk almost every single day, even in the harsher temperatures. The town was small enough that if I wanted I could easily take in the whole place within 2 hours, though I usually didn't. Now that I live Collinsville, which is about 25 times bigger, I don't have that luxury, but I do have much more variety, so it's a good tradeoff. It was variety that drove me to walk to such an extent, and since I'm housesitting for the week near the CWE area, I decided to stroll through some of it.

I learned a few things. There is even more beauty in this neighborhood than I had previously known; there is much more variety of people and places intermixed in this small area than in the whole of a place like Collinsville, my current home of 25,000 people and the typical separation of residential and commercial; a place like this is where I really want to live (God I need a job!). More pertinent to this post, however, is that I truly rediscovered my love for walking. It's not that I'd forsaken strolling about, but the walks I've taken lately were more constitutionals than pleasures. I revamped my regular walks last summer to help lose weight, but I rarely enjoyed them as I used to. The muggy, miserable summer weather didn't help, but the unfamiliarity of my new home (this was only 2-3 years after moving, which may seem like a long time, but I rarely got out into the community) hampered my interest, and it certainly didn't have the glamor of a neighborhood like the area around Forest Park. But I realized today, along with my new-found passion for ambling about, my new community had become familiar and that I could finally begin enjoy my walks around it. Though I knew St. Jacob very intimately from 18 years of dwelling there, I was never bored with the surroundings; rather, I would be startled by some subtlety, some minutiae that I had never seen before, or I would be too occupied with thoughts to really care.

Another thing, which was more emphasized than realized, was that I enjoy observation too much to whiz past things. There was so much to see that I would need to see it again to truly begin to see it, but none of this could I truly appreciate if I just ran by it all. Mark Twain said that "golf is a good walk spoiled." Replace "golf" with "jogging," and you get my sentiment. I chuckle a little inside when ever I pass a jogger (or they pass me), and I've always thought jogging was a silly thing, though for a long time I just accepted that as an opinion, perhaps unfounded. (Also, my body just never accepted long-distance running, so that might have influenced it.) Last year I read The Primal Lifestyle, which helped me lose weight, become healthier, and gave me a reason for my suspicions of sustained running. The author, Mark Sisson, was a former long-distance runner (an Olympic one, I think) who would jog and run for many miles almost every day. He writes that such a lifestyle, coupled with runners' diet filled with carbohydrates, was actually making him unhealthy. Sure, he was incredibly fit, but build of body does good health denote. Such sustained fast paces depresses the immune system, which accounts for a higher amount of minor illnesses among runners. There are scientists who also say it smacks of evolution, that mankind didn't evolve to constantly run but to walk, and that sprinting was merely a survival technique.

So maybe my physical and mental instincts are right, that walking with intermittent sprinting is the most healthful option. At the least, I will see the things that I would miss if I just ran past it.