YOU DON’T HAVE TO WALK ALONE
Groups offer exercise, camaraderie
Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher and theologian
Ideally, walking is a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned, as “three notes suddenly making a chord,” writer Rebecca Solnit posited in Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin Books, 2001).
Walking, she wrote, “allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”
Montreal walkers of all ages are taking to urban sidewalks and residential neighbourhoods, to the Lachine Canal and to Mount Royal, to downtown and to the suburbs in walking clubs and groups. They are walking for the exercise and to challenge themselves, and also for the camaraderie: you don’t stay strangers for long when you’re walking in a group.
“It’s walking together; it’s friendship; it’s education; it’s endurance,” said Olga Horge, who has known fellow Montreal Urban Hikers cofounder Eleanor Hynes for nearly 20 years. The walks they organize are generally 6 to 8 kilometres long; about half are guided walks — like the one Hynes led this month past several downtown hospitals, including some that are closed. She talked about their origins, their histories and their specialties.
“An urban hiker is someone who looks at what they’re walking past,” Hynes said. “You make a note of where you are in the city. I have walked most of Montreal that way, and it’s great.”
Some clubs organize more demanding walks. The City Slickers, for instance, walk the circumference of Montreal in six weekly walks of 25 km each, with much of the group keeping to an average pace of 6 km an hour.
The members of the Ramblers Association do shorter walks, mainly through suburban neighbourhoods. Paul Michetti, who is in charge of membership for the group, has led a guided walk for the Ramblers in Pointe-Claire South highlighting the area’s parks, and another through streets of Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue and Baie-d’Urfé; in September he will lead a walk in the Bois-de-Liesse Nature Park. “All the walks are between 8 and 10 km and are designed so that people can get home early and still have the rest of the day to do other things,” he said.
Henry David Thoreau, the American essayist, poet and philosopher, observed: “An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”
Walking in a group encourages people, said Valerie Cook, a veteran walker and hiker who organizes the City Slickers walks. Most of its walkers also hike with a group called Randonnée Aventure, and so the Saturday walks are scheduled for weekends when there are no hikes.
“It’s amazing to see people who start out thinking, ‘Why on earth do you want to walk 25 km?’ — and then it becomes like an addiction,” she said. “People who are not serious walkers don’t get it; I get a great sense of personal satisfaction from doing the walks, and it inspires me to see how many people are progressing and doing their personal bests.”
Montreal historian and author Colleen Gray did her first City Slickers walk at the end of July — a 25-km walk that began on Ste-Anne St. in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, went through Senneville and ended in Pierrefonds. Although “I’m a pretty good city walker, I was challenged,” she said. “I felt good about the level of fitness I was at, and it was fun to be outside and walking.
“You get rid of a lot of stress in a walk like that. At the end of it, I felt exhausted and wondered, ‘Why have I done this?’ But two days following that day, I felt an extensive clarity and much more peaceful. You have to rest — and then you feel everything is just fine.”
Michetti, who walks with the City Slickers as well as the Ramblers and also with a small, word-of-mouth-only offshoot of the Slickers dubbed the City Slackers, calls himself a serious walker, although not an obsessive one. “I just enjoy walking whenever I can — and it doesn’t have to be long distances, either,” he said. “On most days I walk about 6 to 8 km, which keeps me in shape for longer walks.”
Comedian Steven Wright observed: “Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”
The Slackers, all members or past members of Randonnée Aventure, “welcome friends to join us but, while we usually don’t walk 25 km like the City Slickers do, we do walk anywhere from 15 to 20 km on an outing,” Michetti said.
Cook of the City Slickers said she encourages new walkers to start out with a walk of 10 to 12 km their first time with the group and to go at “their comfortable pace.” Some walkers with the City Slickers are in their 30s and 40s, a lot are in their 50s and 60s, “and we have a couple of people well into their 80s who walk at a fair pace,” she said.
“It’s going at a certain pace that is the fitness part of the walk,” Cook said. “A regular walker would have no problem.” Although “it’s not a terribly fast pace, someone who is not really a walker would not be able to do it.”
People must be fit to participate in Ramblers Association activities, said founder Terry Browitt, “but not super fit. We discourage people who don’t do anything, but you don’t have to be able to sprint 100 yards to keep up with us.
“We are older: when I formed the club 10 years ago, I realized that there are lots of clubs out there that cater to elite athletes. I am 75; one woman in the group who keeps ahead of me is 77.”
The therapeutic properties of moving around on our feet are myriad — and backed by more and more data, writer Dan Rubinstein observed in The Walking Cure, a powerful 2013 story in the Walrus magazine.
“Walking protects you from obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes. It lowers blood pressure, improves cholesterol, and builds bone mass,” he wrote.
“Walking improves your balance, preventing falls. It strengthens the muscles in your arms and
legs, and gives your joints better range of motion. It eases back pain, and reduces the risk of glaucoma.”
Among other benefits of walking Rubinstein cited: it eases anger and confusion, limits depression and anxiety and leads to better sleep. In short: walking helps keep us healthy. As the British historian and academic G.M. Trevelyan put it: “I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.”