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[A compendium of 19th-Century Thought on the value of Walking for health [mental and physical,] creativity, observational prowess, "Moving Church," Relationship Bonder, and one instance of Warfare Survival. Zero aspects of the actual technique of this Old School Method of Walking are discussed. That is all in the 64--minute video and support package that contains 2 12-Week Programs. See the Program for even more details and support: Unleaded: Warrior Walking, the Only Cardio You Need for Combination Fighting, Physical Culture and Attacking the Outdoors.
“He that can travel well afoot, keeps a good horse.”—Benjamin
Franklin
“Your true kingdom is just around you, and your leg
is your scepter. A muscular, manly leg, one untarnished by sloth or sensuality,
is a wonderful thing.” –Alfred Barron, Foot Notes, Or, Walking as a
Fine Art, 1875
The average person walks 3,000-4,000 steps
per day.
“It is good for a man to keep himself in such
condition that he can do ten miles on short notice. The deficiency in this
respect, to which most people confess, is not a pleasant thing to contemplate.”
–Alfred Barron, Footnotes, Or, Walking as a Fine Art, 1875
Solvitur ambulando: A
Latin-Roman phrase, loosely “It is solved by walking,” referring to the
reflective and problem unwinding nature of walking.
We see a similar thought expressed in the French flaneur,
a somewhat complex definition that can be loosely defined as…
“Referring to a person, literally meaning
"stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or
"loafer", but with some nuance. Flânerie is the act of
strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the
noun is boulevardier.
A flâneur is
an ambivalent figure of urban affluence, representing the ability to wander
detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of
contemporary life.
The flaneur mindset can be read as embodied in this
quote that opens Rafeal Sabatini’s Scaramouche.
“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense
that the world was mad.”
Those 3,000 to 4,000 steps translates to
1.5 to 2 miles per day.
“For most urbanites there is the opportunity for
the daily walk to and from work, if only they were not tempted by the wheel of
the street car or motor. During the subway strike in New York not long ago I
saw ablebodied men riding in improvised barges or buses going at a
slower-than-walking pace, because, I suppose, though still possessed of legs,
these cliff-dwellers had become enslaved by wheels, just like the old
mythical Ixion who was tied to one.” –John Finley, “Traveling Afoot,”
1917
Imagine how much more Mr. Finley would grouse today at
how many actual feet we do not put in front of another.
“When I see the discomforts that ablebodied
American men will put up with rather than go a mile or half a mile on foot, the
abuses they will tolerate and encourage, crowding the street car on a little
fall in the temperature or the appearance of an inch or two of snow, packing up
to overflowing, dangling to the straps, treading on each other’s toes,
breathing each other’s breaths, crushing the women and children, hanging by
tooth and nail to a square inch of the platform, imperiling their limbs and
killing the horses—I think the commonest tramp in the street has good reason to
felicitate himself on his rare privilege of going afoot. Indeed, a race that
neglects or despises this primitive gift, that fears the touch of the soil,
that has no footpaths, no community of ownership in the land which they imply,
that warns off the walker as a trespasser, that knows no way but the highway,
the carriage-way, that forgets the stile, the foot-bridge, that even ignores
the rights of the pedestrian in the public road, providing no escape for him
but in the ditch or up the bank, is in a fair way to far more serious
degeneracy.” –John Burroughs, “The Exhilarations of the Road,” 1895
Boosting a walking distance to a mere 4 miles
per day can contribute to an approximate 1 pound of weight loss per week.
Theodore Roosevelt referring to his 50-Miles over 2-Days
Test he prescribed for Army Officers after being taken aback at the lack of conditioning
in the cadre.
He took his own medicine and walked in all weather conditions.
“The original test of 50 miles in three days did a
very great deal of good. It decreased by thousands of dollars the money
expended on street car fare, and by a much greater sum the amount expended over
the bar. It eliminated a number of the wholly unfit; it taught officers to
walk; it forced them to learn the care of their feet and that of their men; and
it improved their general health and was rapidly forming a taste for physical
exercise…
This test may have been a bit too
strenuous for old hearts (of men who had never taken any exercise), but it was
excellent as a matter of instruction and training of handling feet—and in an
emergency (such as we soon may have in Mexico) sound hearts are not much good
if the feet won’t stand.”
Where Roosevelt emphasized the conditioning/robustifying
side of walking, Burroughs adds in the “Building of Observational Prowess.”
“Your pedestrian is always cheerful, alert,
refreshed, with his heart in his hand and his hand free to all. He looks down
upon nobody; he is on the common level. His pores are all open, his circulation
is active, his digestion good. His heart is not cold, nor his faculties asleep.
He is the only real traveller…He is not isolated, but one with things, with the
farms and industries on either hand. The vital, universal currents play through
him. He knows the ground is alive; he feels the pulses of the wind, and reads
the mute language of things. His sympathies are all aroused; his senses are
continually reporting messages to his mind. Wind, frost, ruin, heat, cold, are
something to him. He is not merely a spectator of the panorama of nature, but a
participator in it. He experiences the country he passes through—tastes it,
feels it, absorbs it; the traveller in his fine carriage sees it merely. This
gives the fresh charm to that class of books that may be called “Views Afoot,”
and to the narratives of hunters, naturalists, exploring parties, etc. The
walker does not need a large territory. When you get into a railway car you
want a continent, the man in his carriage requires a township; but a walker
like Thoreau finds as much and more along the shores of Walden pond…
I think if I could walk through a country
I should not only see many things and have adventures that I would otherwise
miss, but that I should come into relations with that country at first band,
and with the men and women in it, in a way that would afford the deepest
satisfaction…
Man takes root at his feet, and at best he
is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage, till he has
established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his
soles to it. Then the tie of association is born; then spring those invisible
fibres and rootlets through which character comes to smack of the soil, and
which makes a man kindred to the spot of earth he inhabits.”
-John Burroughs, “The Exhilarations of the Road,” 1895
Mr. Barron emphasizes that a walk can also be an
inward journey.
“I walk chiefly to visit natural objects, but I
sometimes go on foot to visit myself. It often happens when I am on an
outward-bound excursion, that I also discover a good deal of my own thought. He
is a poor reporter, indeed, who does not note his thought as well as his sight.
The profit of a walk depends on your waiting for the golden opportunity — on
your getting an inspired hint before setting out…
These members [legs] when in motion, are
so stimulating to thought and mind, they almost deserve to be called the
reflective organs. As in the night an iron-shod horse stumbling along a stony
road kicks out sparks, so let a man take to his legs and soon his brain will
begin to grow luminous and sparkle.” –Alfred Barron,
Foot Notes, Or, Walking as a Fine Art, 1875
Walking As Creative Spark, Flint for the
Intellect
“Much bending over the folio does not make the
better part of poetry or of prose. It inheres as much in the physiological
condition that results from the swinging of the legs, which movement quickens
heart action and stimulates the brain by supplying it with blood charged with
the life-giving principle of the open air.
By taking a lover’s walk with the muse one
may more readily woo words into new relations with thought than by sitting at a
desk. And, leaving aside the matter of inspiration and looking at the subject
from a lower plane, one finds that walking abroad often gives to the elusive,
amorphous ideas, lurking darkly in the cerebral background, such clarity as is
vainly sought within the compass of thought-impeding walls. Nearly all those
poets whose lives are open to us have been good walkers—men and women who
rambled about everywhere, adding to the scholar’s stimulus of study a truer
poetical stimulus found along the woodland ways and out under the blue tenuity
of the sky. In fact, I have long suspected that the flabby flexors and
extensors of the locomotor media of our modern poets are largely responsible
for the invertebrate verse of present production.
…Shelley, we are told, rambled everywhere.
Goethe found his extensive walks about Weimar a source of great inspirational
profit. Browning’s incomparable “Parcellus”‘ was composed for the most part
during his rambles in the Dulwick woods. At any stage of his superb singing,
wherever he happened to be, he would give his feet the freedom of the highway
and the byway. He composed in the open air and trod out, as it were, many of
his best lines. The tonic quality of his verse is, in a great measure, due to
his habit of faring forth where he might “think the thoughts that lilies speak
in white.”
…Dickens thought that it was necessary for
him to walk as many hours as he wrote, and the excess of animal spirits which
his work reveals throughout makes one feel that his system for maintaining that
physical energy which begets mental alertness was an excellent one.
That artificial aid to locomotion, the
bicycle, is in no way conducive to deep thought. Zola found that when he wanted
to stop thinking the surest way was to ride forth a-wheel. The man with the
“Here-I-come!” look in his face worn by so many wheelmen, is not likely to be
doing much in the way of creative thought, clever and amiable though he may be
as a road companion.
As for the philosophic brood, I find that
most of them were men of sound legs, from Plato and Aristotle of the famous
walking school down to Montaigne, Johnson, Carlyle, Ruskin and our own clearest
minds, Emerson and Thoreau. Montaigne would have no fire in his great Circular
study, which was “16 paces” (or shall we say about 40 feet?) in diameter. He
warmed his mind as well as his body by walking. ‘My thoughts will sleep if I
seat them,’ he declares. ‘My wit will not budge if my legs do not shake it up.’
…It is true that the nearer you approach
the age of the trolley, the less depth is apparent in philosophy; which leads
one to suspect that the Peripatetic School is the true school in any age…
As for Thoreau, his fine contribution to
the world’s literature was as truly walked as it was written. So has been the
work of John Burroughs, on the Atlantic side of the continent, and that of John
Muir, the accredited spokesman for nature on the Pacific coast. If writings may
be said to be manufactured by an author, then these latter were as truly
pedufactured; and in offering our lexicographers this uncouth word I do so
without a blush. For I plead guilty to a strong prejudice for the book that is
walked first and written afterward. Other work may be more brilliant, and, in a
sense, more clever, but that quality which one finds in the book which is
walked is something never found in the book that makes no show of legs but all
of head. The book that is walked, whether of prose or of verse, reveals ‘the
buoyant child surviving in the man,’ of which Coleridge, himself a stout foot
traveler, sings.”
“I have two doctors, my left leg and
my right. When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live
at such close quarters that the one always catches melancholy from the other) I
know that I have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again.” –George
Macaulay Trevelyan, “Walking,” 1913
Walking as Anti-Depressant
Science has confirmed this observation of Thoreau.
“I think that I cannot preserve my health
and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least— and it is commonly more
than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for
your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the
mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but
all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the
legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they
deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.
I am alarmed when it happens that I have
walked a mile into the woods bodily without getting there in spirit. In my
afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my
obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off
the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where
my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses.
What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the
woods?” –Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” 1862
Walking as Platonic Binder or Romantic Aphrodisiac
“The roads and paths you have walked along in
summer and winter weather, the fields and hills which you have looked upon in
lightness and gladness of heart, where fresh thoughts have come into your mind,
or some noble prospect has opened before you, and especially the quiet ways
where you have walked in sweet converse with your friend, pausing under the
trees, drinking at the spring—henceforth they are not the same; a new charm is
added; those thoughts spring there perennial, your friend walks there forever.”
–John Burroughs, “The Exhilarations of the Road,” 1895
Walking As Preferred Choice of Gritty
Necessity
Noted buffalo hunter Waldo P. Abbott also spent time
as a guide for the US Army.
After the bloody Battle of the Rosebud, assistance was
required, but that lay at a good distance though hostile Sioux Territory.
General Crook approached Mr. Abbott, offered him his
best horse and bade him to go for help.
Abbott declined the horse, and instead stripped six
pairs of moccasins of dead Sioux and set off afoot saying he would be faster
this way and better concealed.
For another such story of Outdoor Grit see
the story of The Rocky Mountain Iron Man.
To start putting one foot in front of another with the
efficient and mighty unusual technique used by Old Schoolers, to garner all the
benefits set forth here see Unleaded: Warrior Walking, the Only Cardio You Need for Combination Fighting, Physical Culture and Attacking the Outdoors
Resources for Livin’ the
Warrior Life, Not Just Readin’ About It
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