Walking Your Way to Health

For some people a walk of a few miles is a daunting task, and some regard walkers as a strange breed, hovering somewhere between insanity and heroism.I can recall a time when a thirteen year old  pupil asked me, "Sir, are you getting the bus home?" I said that I was not, as I was going to walk two miles and then pick  up a bus [I had an appointment that night.] He was astounded, so I said "Two miles is nothing, I often walk the three and a half to school in the morning." His eyes widened in amazement, and as I walked off I heard him say of me, " He must be well hard!"

Yet while walking can be seen by some people as strange, it is an activity richly rewarding. The variety is enriching, for the same place can be experienced in a range of moods. I have experienced the south of the Carnaeddau mountain range in a glorious summer when the sky was blue and the sun beamed down on the panorama visible from the summit of Pen yr Ole Wen, but I have met the same range in February when the snows swirled thickly across the mountains under a grey sky. Both experience were rewarding, but the latter was the more challenging. 

Even if the weather is inclement a walk can be a lovely experience. There was  one time when Maureen and I were visiting Bergen, in Norway, Europe's rainiest city. We ascended by cable car to half way up the mountain overlooking the town and walked to the summit. We should have known, but as we stood atop the peak, the first drops fell. And fell! We walked down the mountain in strangely good humour, considering that we were soaked, as the experience of the landscape was so enjoyable. I can remember feeling very happy as we hiked through the deluge.  In a similar vein,  one May I walked in gentle English rain through a woodland on the North Downs, the softly rolling chalk hills that amble across part of Southern England. As the rain fell steadily, I trod my way through a woodland rich in bluebells that proliferated under the interplay of light and shade as the sunlight filtered through the canopy. The beautiful experience was worth the wetting. 

There is a variety in walking as rich as the landscapes through which you roam. Not only is walking a health giving activity beneficial to the body as a whole, but it is an emotional and spiritual experience. The Greeks and Romans  had a proverb, solvitur ambulando [it is solved by walking] by which they meant that to think out a problem you need to walk while thinking. We note that monasteries have cloisters, long quiet corridors along which monks might stroll while meditating. The monks walk prayerfully. A good walk can calm the emotions and soothe the agitated spirit. Moreover, simply walking with a loved one is a shared experience that can be undertaken without much need for verbal communication, simply both sharing the activity, harmonizing your pace with each other and silently enjoying the beauty of the scenery or the culture of the area through which you walk. 

People probably knew intuitively that walking was good for them for many millenia, and their insights have been steadily put on a scientific footing.  In the USA the National Walkers Health Survey, which studied 15045 walkers confirmed this insight. As expected the walkers had cardiovascular health superior to non-walkers [excluding runners.] Their blood pressure and cholesterol levels were healthier than the non-exercising group, and there were possible gains in the diminished likelihood of coronary disease. Walkers had lower Body Mass Indices and  thinner waists than joggers, though serious runners are a different matter. Put simply, gentle sustained exercise of the type that is happening when we walk is beneficial. The Times, 24 Sept 2016, quotes Sanjay Sharma, a professor of medicine at St George's University Foundation Trust, who  states that research shows that moderately paced walking reduces the risk of heart attack by fifty per cent in people in their fifties and sixties.  Quite simply, walking is very good exercise for older people, but also for young people as well. 

The Harvard Nurses Health  Study also found that walking regularly reduced the incidence of type 2 diabetes by thirty percent. This may be because this disease is associated with obesity and walkers are not as likely to be as fat as non-walkers are,but a walk after eating has been found to balance blood sugar levels for twenty four hours, and as diabetes is due to unhealthy blood sugar levels balancing must be beneficial. 

Yet there are other benefits. Polly Vernon, writing in the Times 24th September 2016 reports that within two weeks of building daily walking into her lifestyle her muscle tone had improved, her shape was better as her muscles strengthened and she was maintaining a good weight. An average sized person uses 88 calories per mile when walking, so three miles is over 250 calories gone.I wear a pedometer every day to check how many steps I have done,how many calories spent and what mileage I have trodden. Today I have done 6.49 kilometres, which is about four and a half miles.  

But it is not just the muscles that benefit . The University of Boston discovered that sufferers from knee arthritis can reduce their pain by taking up walking six thousand steps a day. But the act of walking stresses the bones in a positive way, making them react to stress by improving bone mass, and that is quite important in older people, in whom bone mass can decline through the ageing process. In fact,maintaining healthy exercise resists the ageing process and can, it is sometimes said, add seven years to our lives. 

Various researchers have discovered that walking protects our brains. There have been studies at the University of Miami into the effects of walking, which show that those who do not walk experience cognitive decline in ageing quicker than walkers do, and they have shown that walking six miles a week protects brain size and enhances memory. This enhancement of cognitive capacity seems greatest in regions associated with planning and memory.

Studies at the University of  Toulouse have shown that walking outdoors improves mood and helps alleviate mild depression. I think that this may be due to the fact that walking is an inherently stress-free activity, so  when we do it we are replacing stressful activities with a stress-free one, and that cannot be bad for us.  

There is a link between walking and thinking. Stephen Zwolinsky of Leeds Beckett university says that human are designed to solve problems while walking for fourteen hours a day. I know that when I was a theological student in the North West of Ireland I used to slip out of college at night [against the rules, but no one looked for me] and walk the roads, often in the dark,pondering questions in the philosophy of religion. I got more from that than I did from some lectures. We can walk alert to nature, picking up its sights and sounds, listening to the music of wind and water and catching the play of the light and the ever-changing cloudscapes above us. When walking, be it in town or country, we can gently stimulate our minds in a low-stress way, though pondering along dark lanes at night might not be the lowest stressed from of walking. 

The precise amount of walking that we need to do daily is not clear.Several years ago scientists plucked a figure from the air of ten thousand steps a day, but there was never any scientific basis for this, and more recent figures have been around twelve thousand steps daily. But I believe that any regular walking is good for you. I rarely do ten thousand steps a day, but seven thousand is not unusual for me. I am at 7923 today and it is only five o'clock  in the afternoon, so there is more time to walk.

I have always loved walking, ever since my parents, who could not afford a car, used to take me and my brother by bus to Werneth Low, a small peak in the foothills of the Pennines, the range that divides North West from North East England. Happy days when I was under five years old and the sun shone. I have not done a twenty mile walk for some time, as commitments to family and the allotment are quite demanding, but I have done plenty of shorter walks. There is a yearning on me for a good long one, so where next and when, as the Autumn is drawing in and the weather in our stormy isle is not so good?