They Call Me the Walkin' Man
I Guess That's What I Am
I am a walker. I started walking four or five times a week in 2008. At the end of that year, I decided that I could walk at least a few minutes every day. As of the day this was posted, I’ve walked 5323 days in a row, and counting.
I started walking because I was middle-aged and felt as though I needed to be doing something physical before it was too late. I never thought of myself as a gym guy, I wasn’t playing ball anymore, I did not want to invest in a treadmill, I had a bicycle that I hardly rode, we don’t have a pool and I’m not much of a swimmer, anyway. The only exercise I seemed to be getting was shoveling food into my piehole.
I read an article in Parade magazine touting the benefits of walking regularly, and I thought, well, I could do that. I can walk and it’s free, so why not?
Actually, my wife had suggested we go for walks, but I wasn’t really into it. However, the time seemed right to start doing something, so I became a walker. A solo walker. She rarely joins me on my walks because, A. I walk too fast, B. I walk too far, and C. I jaywalk too much. That’s how the walking became my thing, not our thing.
What is the postman’s motto? “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” That could be my walking motto, except for the courier part. I’ve walked when the temperature was 12 degrees with snow crunching under my feet and I was freezing my ass off. I’ve walked when the thermometer was over 110, and my ass was burning up. I’ve walked in rain and snow and sleet and wind, and in the beautiful, glorious sunshine. I’ve walked in the dead of night and at high noon. I’ve walked for a few minutes and a few hours. I’ve walked in airports from Las Vegas to Munich. I’ve walked when I had the flu and the common cold. I’ve walked with pneumonia, and a couple of hours after a colonoscopy. I’ve walked with headaches, earaches, and body aches, joint pain, foot pain, and back pain, and with strained muscles, pulled muscles, and weak muscles. I’ve walked with a broken bone. I’ve walked adjacent to magnificent natural wonders such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, Lake Michigan and Lake Erie, and the Danube River. I’ve walked in forests and deserts and mountains and grasslands and on beaches and floodplains and city streets and unpaved country roads. I’ve walked in little podunk towns and great world capitals such as Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest. I’m a walker. It is what I do.
I had been walking for, I don’t know, maybe a year or so, when I realized that I could be walking to work every day. By cutting through a park and a couple of alleys, I was able to reduce the distance to around two and a quarter miles. I could do that in less than 40 minutes. “Walking to Work Season” started in October, usually. I would begin to get a little slimy in mid to late April, so that is when I would stop. It was too hot to walk to work after then, not because it was too hot for me to be out there, I just did not want to be all sweaty when I arrived. That is when I would get up earlier to walk a bit before work.
The health benefits were obvious and I cut my car mileage basically in half. I got to feeling all superior because not only was I doing something healthy for myself, I was doing something healthy for the environment. Good on me.
But then I transferred to a new branch library that was 10 miles away, which made walking to work impractical. I had to find a new way to satisfy what my wife calls my walking “obsession”.
The solution was to arise even earlier - 4:30 am on work days. That gave me time to check my email, scan the news, get a decent walk in and still get ready for work and feed the cats, take out the trash, and finish up my other assigned chores. The downside to such an early start was that, for a large part of the year, I had to walk in the dark.
One March morning, I was out there at around 5:30. I had walked about 150 feet or so, and I was fooling with my phone as I walked, making sure my tracker app was working. It was dark and there are no streetlights in our neighborhood, but there was ambient light from the outdoor lights on the houses. Well, I was not watching where I was going and I got too close to the edge of the sidewalk with my right foot. My ankle turned about 90 degrees in a direction it is not supposed to go and I went down in a heap. My ankle hurt like a sumbitch (as we would say in the old country). I laid there for 2 or 3 minutes, trying to assess the situation. I finally got up and thought I could continue my walk, but maybe I’d cut it short if my ankle did not start to feel better.
I walked around a bit and it still hurt like hell so I decided to go home. I wound up walking a little less than a mile. It was kind of a short walk, I know, but my excuse was I had a broken bone in my leg. Yes, it turned out that I had fractured the tip of my fibula. The orthopedist put me in a boot and said to keep it elevated when I was sitting, then come back in a month.
He did not say to stop walking, so I was back out there the next morning for my daily walk, although it was more of a hobble than a walk. I had a consecutive days of walking streak going and I was not going to stop for a broken bone. And, truthfully, I make it sound worse than it was. My ankle was swollen and eventually there was bruising all over my foot, but it really was not too bad. My injury was closer to a paper cut than a major bone that had been snapped in half. So, my advice is that if you have to have a broken bone, fracturing the tip of your fibula is probably one of the best ones to have.
Originally, I guess I wanted to see if I could walk every day for a whole year. That was accomplished rather easily. After several years of walking every day, I began to say that my goal was 2633 consecutive walking days. Why 2633? Well, Cal Ripkin’s MLB consecutive games played record was 2632. I reached that in 7 years and a few months. The next goal was Pete Rose’s MLB all-time record for hits - 4256. Got that one, too. Now, I just take it one day at a time. I suppose that someday the walking streak will end. The universe has not found a way to stop me yet, though.