Walkingback to happiness

It helped her cope with a marriage break-up, her sister’s death, even the Celeb jungle. Forget self-help books, says JANET STREET-PORTER. Just get your boots on!

Forget dieting, yoga, juicing or meditation. Just put one foot in front of the other — and keep up a steady pace — and you will be able to deal with anything life throws your way. It’s cheaper than therapy and just as effective. Any doubts? then see an astonishing new film, Wild, starring reese Witherspoon, which tells the true story of Cheryl Strayed, a young woman whose life had hit rock bottom. Her beloved mother had unexpectedly died of cancer, her unsatisfactory marriage had ended in divorce, and Cheryl obliterated her pain using heroin and indulging in sex with total strangers.

to break this cycle of misery and self-destruction, Strayed — with no experience of the outdoor life — decided to walk more than 1,100 miles alone along America’s challenging Pacific Crest trail, heading north from the Mexican border up the west coast to Washington State, ending with the aptly named Bridge of the gods over the great Columbia river.

on this bridge, Cheryl realises her journey has served its purpose: she’s a new woman, ready to face whatever life will bring.

Along the way this solitary female would encoun-ter snakes, wolves, sheer cliff faces, deep snow and leering male hunters. She would climb mountains and start to hallucinate.

She started a rank amateur, with an overloaded pack full of unnecessary clobber and boots a size too small. the chances of completing 100 miles, let alone more than a thousand, were virtu-ally nil. Cheryl had to conquer her fear of the unknown, not to men-tion the physical toll of surviving in extreme temperatures.

Her book chronicling her epic walk has topped the bestseller lists in America, was endorsed by oprah Winfrey’s book club and is now a moving fi l m which opened to glowing reviews.

Some of the sequences are painful to watch — exhausted and crying, Cheryl loses a boot which topples over a cliff as she wrenches off a rotten toenail. Incandescent with rage, she hurls the other one into the abyss, and then trudges the next 100 miles wearing sandals held together wit h parcel tape.

As the miles go by Cheryl gradually tough-ens up, masters basic survival skills, and — most important of all — uses the walk to re-live the best and worst times in her past, from a child-hood blighted by an alco-holic dad, to her distress at her mother’s death.

gradually, not just her blisters and her grazes heal, but her mind calms and she finds inner peace. It’s a story that will resonate with lots of people.

THrougH my own expe-riences, I know walking is a great healer. All my life, I’ve embarked on some huge treks in chal-lenging landscapes. they have taught me how to be fearless, how to overcome disappointment and how to deal with death and loss.

I also walk every day, even if it’s just 30 minutes instead of getting a train or a bus, as a way of marshal-ling my thoughts and shrinking what’s bugging or irritating me. In short, walking is an indispensable part of my daily routine.

the very act of putting one foot in front of the other, the simple repet-itive motion, for hour after hour, is extremely calming.

A few years ago now, to escape a horrible marriage, I walked out of the door of my house in Central London with just a small rucksack, not telling my partner where I was going. I had decided to follow water, so I walked down to the river thames, turned right and followed it all the way to Brentford in West London and the start of the grand union Canal.

I spent the first night at a friend’s house and the next day walked r i ght around North London, following the canal to Watford. over the next few days, I followed towpaths to Northampton.

gradually, I forgot all about this destructive relationship. I started listening to birds, and water was extremely calming. It only took four days to exorcise that awful bloke from my mind — he would inflict no more pain or negativity in my life.

I didn’t apportion blame, or pick over what had gone wrong and why I was so stupid as to marry him, I just walked him right out of my world.

When my sister died a horrible death from brain and lung cancer in 2006, I walked the moors in York-shire, finding solace in the wind and the rain. As I trudged along, I remembered the good times we had as kids, not the bickering teenage years or her final painful decline.

I recalled summers spent playing on the beach in Llanfairfechan, my mother’s village in North Wales. Coated in olive oil (Mum bought it in tiny bottles at the chemist) as our sun protection, we’d build sand castles and draw pictures around the giant jellyfish that lay stranded by the outgoing tide.

NoW, walking over the bleak moorland near my home in Yorkshire, I relived those happy days and hoped that my sister had found her own peace. Sometimes I’ve walked l ong distances — hundreds of miles from Dungeness to Weston-super-Mare, and fr o m Cardi f f to Conwy. I’ve walked Hadrian’s Wall and spent three weeks trekking in the Himalayas.

Sometimes, I ’ ve walked to explore new land scapes and unfamiliar cultures, other times as a way of challenging myself to get out of a rut, to move out of my privileged comfort zone. the problem with modern life is that we forget how to do anything for ourselves, when shopping and cooking is so easy, when we have central heating and hot water.

All this mollycoddles us and stops us experiencing the power of nature. there’s nothing like walking day after day to break out of a cosy routine, and sharpen your senses.

A few years ago, I read about the Larapinta trail, a long- distance walk that starts in Alice Springs, in the Australian Bush, and fol-lows the spine of the MacDonnell mountain range through a bleak and arid desert.

I investigated it on the internet and found a travel company that organised guided treks, with a back-up vehicle driven by someone who would pitch tents and carry the heavy equipment.

So for eight days I padded along, accompanied only by a professional guide — a man I’d never met before — enduring temperatures in the mid-30s, through shimmering red dust, with no shade. We ate in the evening when the sun went down and the flies vanished.

I swam in waterholes and spent up to six hours a day in total silence — I know you’ll find that hard to believe. All I heard was the sound of my own breathing and the crunch of the stones underfoot. Some peo-ple walk wearing iPods, but I prefer the soundtrack of nature.

After that extreme walk, I was well equipped to take part in I’m A Celebrity . . .get Me out of Here! Walking taught me to focus on the beautiful greenery overhead, to deal with the dirt and the bush-tucker trials.

Back in Blighty, walking has helped me shrink work and personal problems down to size, and tune in to the more important things in life — the weather, and landscape, light and shade, sound and silence.

the ironic thing in all this is that I grew up in West London in a ter-race house, and I would never have predicted I would turn out to be a fanatical walker. I like parties, social events, gossip and friendship.

But as I’ve got older, I also want isolation. Modern life is a cacophony of noise and j angle — we are expected to be on call for work every single day. texts, emails and tweets arrive incessantly.

Because of that, I’ve had to learn how to relax, how to do nothing,

TURN TO PAGE 45

how to empty my head of detritus and clutter. That’s the only way you get any good ideas, if you’re a writer.

Walking is also a way of shedding the people and things in your life you don’t need any more, of accepting that sometimes you will get passed over for work, and that as you get older, people can ignore you. It doesn’t make you less special, but you have to learn to love yourself.

And walking gives you self-worth because it provides a unique sense of achievement. Climbing Kilimanjaro with Elton John’s other half David Furnish and another friend was extremely gruelling.

Like Cheryl Strayed, the inspiration for the new film, I found myself going slightly nuts, talking to animals!

AT 16,000ft, l i ghtheaded with altitude sickness, I started a conversation with a little rodent that popped out from under a rock while I was eating a snack and resting my weary legs.

For the past two days I’d walked through featureless tundra, no plants, just bare grey rock — and this little creature was a delightful floorshow.

Walking teaches you to find entertainment in simple ways, not relying on technology or expensive toys.

Once, a very close friend, who had been my walking companion for a decade, decided she didn’t want to speak to me any more. To this day I don’t know why — but that’s what happens with friends, you can’t control how they feel, no matter how much you think you can.

I knew there was only one way to get over that: I walked from Edinburgh to London, around 400 miles, through horrible weather, over fields planted with potatoes, t hrough Northumberland’s interminably dreary Kielder Forest, in thick mist. By the time I got to the M25, though, I’d got over her. I’d shrunk the problem back into proportion. Life goes on.

There’s always a point on any walk when your body wants to give up, and you’ve had enough. Your legs ache and you can’t imagine how much longer you can go on.

One August, I trudged from St Bees Head in Cumbria to Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire — the Coast to Coast trail, more than 120 miles — and it poured with rain almost all the time. Every day, I was happy to eat whatever was put in front of me. I dried my socks on radiators, I washed my knickers in the bath.

At the time, I was running a big television show that could not have been more stressful. But for ten blissful days, all I had to worry about was drying my smalls and getting the right kind of filling in my sandwiches.

I forgot all about on-screen divas, self-centred telly directors, office politics and pompous executives. My world consisted of following one sign to the next, sheltering in a chicken coop to eat lunch in a gale, lying in a hot bath followed by the ritual of filling in my daily diary, which is now one of my most treasured possessions.

There is no ‘point’ to walking — you are not doing it to get a medal. You don’t have to do it to raise money for charity.

Walking gives us a sense of achievement, of being in control, or reclaiming our lives. Which is really important when you consider how much of our time we spend doing what other people want — whether it’s our kids, our family or our partners. We spend too much time nurturing others, putting them before ourselves. We write lists, keep appointments, run our lives to a tightly controlled schedule. We continually waffle on about how ‘stressed’ we are, how busy our days are.

Walking is a way of giving something back to ourselves — because we are worth it.

Try it! Trust me, it’ll change your life.