Walking

As a stream of walkers trickled through Lancaster's main park one recent morning, Marie Ann Nicholson fell into step beside Mayor R. Rex Parris. There was a boarded-up house on the street where her daughter lives in a "nice neighborhood," Nicholson told Parris. The property was vacant. The front lawn had dried up. "It's a total eyesore," said Nicholson, 71, a lifelong resident of Lancaster.

On the first day of class, Chris Marx asks his fifth-grade students how they get to school and what they encounter along the way. Even though most students at Garfield Elementary in Santa Ana walk only a few blocks to class, they often trudge over broken sidewalks and through littered alleyways, rub up against graffiti-covered walls and step over rubble from construction sites. Some dodge roving dogs, homeless people or gang members.

STEPHANIE Felix didn't realize running could be so complicated. The high school junior took up the sport a few years ago and quickly emerged as a top distance runner at La Mirada High School. But then her coach had team members' gaits assessed. The analysis, in which Stephanie was videotaped while running on a treadmill, showed a litany of problems. She shifted her weight to the inner foot, which could lead to ankle and foot injuries.

REMEMBER fitness in the 1970s? All those aerobics classes, leotards and sweatbands, the endless jogging and velour track suits? Got to crank up that heart rate to 90% of maximum, experts told us. No pain, no gain. But today a new, easygoing message reigns: Leave the spandex at home -- you don't have to sweat or even change your clothes. Simply take a walk. Aim for least 30 minutes of activity on most days of the week, experts now advise.

You might call it de-inventing the wheel. In communities and workplaces across the country, new groups are marching together to get Americans off their duffs and on their feet. With six in 10 Americans classified as sedentary, walking advocates have both vast opportunities and a daunting challenge.

For millions of years, we've been ambulating about on two legs. At this late stage, how could walking possibly offer up any out-of-the-ordinary thrills? Here's a sampler: * Racewalking Believe it or not, racewalking used to make the news. In 1867, a New York Times article entitled "The Pedestrian Mania" discussed the latest craze for long-distance speed walking, comparing its practitioners with prizefighters and warning its readers against the sport's "possible risk to ... life."

WHEN Peter Valk, a race walker and walking coach, fires up a new team of walkers, the first thing he tells them is, "It's all about the feet." Valk, 53, of Calabasas, walks 30 miles a week. Over the last five years, he has crossed the finish lines of 13 marathons to support Team in Training, a fundraising effort for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. (He is a leukemia survivor.) He coaches others to do the same. "Shoes," he says, "are a walker's single most important piece of equipment.

WANT to walk? Don't, at present, do much of it? Here are some tips on how, when and where to put one foot in front of the other. * The basics: To reap walking's benefits, you don't have to redline your heart rate but you can't be a slugabed about it, either. The goal is to get your active metabolic rate between 3 and 6 times your resting rate.

STUDIES investigating the health wonders of exercise keep rolling in. But just like with eating habits, physical activity habits are tough to study in gold-standard, randomized clinical trials -- after all, who would agree to be assigned to a marathoners' group for 20 years? Instead, most researchers do the next best thing: study people's exercise habits and see how they fare, health-wise, down the line.

Twenty of so years ago, my friend Marilyn and I decided we did not want to die young. Not that we were so young at the time, but in our mid-40s we figured we might be able to add a few good years to whatever our lifespan would be, by taking up walking. So, for 20 or so years, we have met once a week for a brisk 3-mile walk. And the benefits have been extraordinary.