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Category: walking

Urban Obstacle Course

Urban Obstacle Course

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My one-mile walk to Metro in the afternoon is a study in pedestrian behavior. I became interested in this when I lived in New York, where a rush-hour stroll down Fifth Avenue can be an exercise in start-and-stop frustration.

There are fewer people on D.C. streets but sidewalks can be narrower and walkers slower. So at 5:30 p.m. I must still employ some of the skills I learned in New York: looking for openings in a crowd, gauging the approach of the walker ahead of me, looking down at crucial moments so as not to engage in one of those awkward dances where no one knows whether to go left or right.

If everything works according to plan, I can make it from my office to Metro Center in the same time it would take on the subway.  This produces a lot of satisfaction, some welcome weariness and a renewed appreciation of pedestrian flow.

It’s an urban obstacle course, completed for the day.

Cicadas in the City

Cicadas in the City

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Out the door and down New Jersey Avenue. The familiar arching trees shade the hotel and taxi stand. The Capitol lies ahead; its scaffolding gleams in the noonday sun.

I run for every light, avoid the waits, move as much as possible. It’s the pace that does it, I think — a steady cadence does much to loosen the joints and free up the mind. But scenery helps also, and yesterday’s was perfect. Blue skies, cicadas still singing, all the bustle of early September.

For many years I mourned New York City. Washington, D.C., could never measure up in quirkiness or energy or street life. But in the last several years I’ve mellowed to D.C. I appreciate the cicadas, for instance, and the tall trees that shelter them. Their crescendo is the sound of hot southern cities, a sound that says slow down. No one heeds it, of course, but at least it’s there, mixed in with car horns and sirens.

High Season

High Season

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This is the high season for trail walking. Chilly mornings give way to warm, dry afternoons. The air has a freshness to it, which energizes and motivates. It pushes us up and out, makes us move even when we don’t much feel like it.

I feel like trail-walking this morning but new responsibilities have me in the office today. If I’m lucky I’ll pound some pavement at lunchtime, and that will energize and motivate in a different way.

But for now I’ll dream of a clearing in the forest, a hard-packed path winding out from it, oaks and maples and hickories arching over browning ferns and reddening blackgum. The trail won’t yet be covered but there will be enough leaves to provide a crunch when I walk. A soundtrack for the stroll.

Step It Up

Step It Up

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I heard the surgeon general about midway through a punishing nine-hour drive spent completely on my posterior. A day of little walking for me, in other words. Just the opposite of what the nation’s highest health official was asking us to do.

Half of all Americans don’t get enough exercise, he said. And there’s a cure for that, a simple cure: take a walk. Walking 20 minutes a day can reduce our chances of getting such chronic diseases as diabetes and hypertension. It improves emotional well-being and keeps us sharp as we age.

But even with all these benefits and more, enough people aren’t walking. So the surgeon general is on a mission. Twenty minutes a day is all it takes, he says. Surely we have that much time. As for other excuses — there’s no safe place to walk in one’s community, for instance — part of the Step It Up campaign is to re-think the way Americans live and work, to call for more public transportation and walkable communities.

These are laudable ideas, and I’m with him … well … every step of the way.

(A highly walkable community in the Czech Republic!)

Dog Days Walk

Dog Days Walk

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Walking in the dog days is not unlike taking a bath. The air is full of moisture and weight.

I run down West Ox Road, past houses that have privacy now that trees have leafed out, filled in. As usual I strolled around the containment pond, hoping to see some red-winged blackbirds. But there were none. I realized how much I’d come to count on seeing them there. How each stage of my walk is populated with images and expectations.

Instead, I saw crowded cattails and reeds that might have been elegant had there been some wind blowing through them. We are at the tail end of a season. The scenery is looking tired. Or maybe it’s just the walker who is tired. That’s more like it!

Walking and Talking

Walking and Talking

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Yesterday my sister and I walked on the Capital Crescent Trail in Bethesda, Maryland — and I realized this morning that I have no pictures to show for it. No shots of the tree tunnels, of the bikers and skaters and Sunday-afternoon amblers. This is because we were talking as fast as we were walking.

I am for the most part a solitary stroller, walking alone by choice. It’s when I sift through the day’s events, when I jostle myself free of the routine and to-do list long enough for thoughts to surface. Walking has become an essential writing tool. It’s the great “un-sticker.”

But when presented with a willing companion — someone who will walk and talk with me — ah, there’s almost no better way to make the words fly than moving forward together in space.

Voting for our Feet

Voting for our Feet

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Some folks will pay a premium to walk in the suburbs. Just ask Merrill Lynch. When their lease was up in Rockville, Maryland, they chose to move to the new “mini city” of Pike and Rose — a decision that may have cost them 40 percent more than staying at their office park location.

It’s a decision that’s playing out over and over again in the Washington, D.C.-metro area and across the country. People are voting with their feet — or rather, voting for their feet. They’re paying a premium to live and work where the vibe is urban and the body can move around without being encased in several thousand pounds of steel.

In some ways this isn’t new at all. For centuries — heck, for millennia — humans have gathered to eat, work and walk. We do better when we’re not tied to a desk or an untethered building in the middle of nowhere. We do better together (for the most part). And we do better in motion rather than stasis.

(Detail from the highly walkable city of Annapolis.)

Walkway Over the Hudson

Walkway Over the Hudson

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Two free hours in the Hudson River Valley on Saturday and a walking trail that quite literally took my breath away. It was Walkway Over the Hudson, a New York state park that gave a whole new meaning to rails-to-trails.

When the first trains crossed the Hudson on the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railway the bridge was the longest in the world. It became a park six years ago and claims to be the longest pedestrian bridge in the world.

But what struck me most wasn’t the length but the height. I tried not to look over the edge, my stomach was doing too many loop-the-loops.

So instead I looked straight ahead until I got acclimated, then a glance to the left and a glance to the right to take in the scenery. Ah yes, this was walking. A long paved path to stride on and a sweep of valley and mountain to admire.

Adopt a Spot

Adopt a Spot

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Walking home yesterday from Metro I noticed a sign. “Adopt a Spot,” it said. This is new to me. Adopt a highway, yes. But adopt a spot?

How good to know that spots have  clout, too. That a clump of trees, a curve of trail, a stand of meadow grass could be noticed, claimed, taken to heart.

I think about the spots I love, places I pass daily, corners worn smooth by passage, roads ridden and paths walked. A new boardwalk in the woods. A nubby stump in the forest. A block of sidewalk in the city, pavement stones ragged.

These are the textures that become dreams, that take hold of us and won’t let go.

Do we adopt the spot — or does the spot adopt us? 

Hot Day, Slow Walk

Hot Day, Slow Walk

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Usually we move purposefully, Copper and I. But our purposes are not the same. He has his goals and I have mine. For him, a splendid walk wouldn’t be a walk at all, but a series of stops and starts. Full-tilt runs followed by dead standstills. Meanderings and sniff-fests. Ambles.

Whereas I have a distance marker, a point I’d like to reach — say Fox Mill Road — he lives for the next sign post, guard rail or fire hydrant.

But yesterday our wishes were one and the same. It was late; it was warm. We wanted a brief jaunt, a slow burn. No way would we make it to Fox Mill Road.

So we turned down a pipestem and ogled some showy phlox. (Well, I ogled the phlox; he salivated at a squirrel.)

We paused often to look at the sky. (Well, I looked at the sky; he sniffed the grass.)

The heat and humidity slowed his normal rocket-fire pace to a more comfortable stride where the two of us were walking side by side — almost as if he was heeling.

“You’re doing a great imitation of a well-behaved dog,” I told the little guy. Luckily, his sarcasm meter is always set to low. He looked up at me with his big brown doggie eyes, wagged his tail — and we both kept on walking.