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Walkaholics

Jerold M. Lowenstein

Walking offers discount coupons good at the doctor's, service stations, and, of course, the gym. photo: Matt Lindsay

Though I’ve enjoyed taking walks for years, recently I’ve become a bit of a walkaholic. In fact, I suffer withdrawal symptoms if the hike around town lasts less than two hours on any particular day. San Francisco is an ideal metropolis for bipedal activity, with its Mediterranean climate, aerobic hills, breathtaking views, extensive parks, and distinctive neighborhoods made up of attractive houses and shops. Considering the high-density population here, I’m surprised how few people I encounter while going to and from my lab and wandering about the city.

Drive and the world drives with you. Walk and you walk alone.

It’s no more than an hour by foot to most places where I want to go. During the years I was in active medical practice, each morning saw me pacing eastward across Alta Plaza Park and uphill on Clay Street to the Pacific Campus of California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC). Eight minutes. Nowadays I head west on Clay Street; it’s 20 minutes to my research lab at the California Campus of CPMC.

At noon my research associate and I walk ten minutes to Clement Street, where we have delicious inexpensive lunches, alternating among California, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Javanese cuisines. Since I’m also an inveterate chocoholic, there’s usually a stop at the I Love Chocolate Bakery. Fortunately, walk balances choc, keeping the body mass index in check.

During a typical morning’s trek from home to lab, I observe one or two dog-walkers, one or two moms pushing baby-buggies, several people walking to or from their cars, a lot of construction workers remodeling houses on Clay Street, and almost no one ambulating purposefully for more than a block. It has struck me how rarely I meet any of my medical colleagues outside the walls of the hospital. Typically, they drive from home to work, park in the garage below the medical office building, put in their day’s work, then reverse course to go home. The exception is a dapper Italian-born physician of about my age, who walks to the hospital regularly from his home in the Marina.

Among my favorite destinations are two art museums, each about an hour from home, in opposite directions. The Palace of the Legion of Honor stands on a high bluff at Land’s End, the northwest salient of our city. To get there, you can walk through Sea Cliff with its multi-million dollar homes, and up a long hill with awesome views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin County. Arriving around noon, you can reward yourself with lunch in the delightful museum café before going to see the latest visiting exhibition.

The route to the other museum takes me downtown to Union Square, surrounded by big hotels and department stores, then along Ellis Street through the Tenderloin, the city’s underbelly. Indigents, homeless, and alcoholics hang out here, on the opposite economic pole from Sea Cliff. In this depressing terrain, however, there’s a blossoming of new immigrants from Southeast Asia—Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese—and their cheerful restaurants and grocery stores.

After crossing Market Street, one can stroll through the urban oasis of Yerba Buena Park to SFMOMA, the Egyptesque Museum of Modern Art. Lately you could be transported skyward by a Marc Chagall retrospective or brought crashing back to earth by the freaky photography of Diane Arbus. And now you’ll also find the California Academy of Sciences in its new home on Howard Street.

At the neighborhood gym, I exercise my arms and shoulders, since those are the only muscle groups that don’t get a good tone-up from walking. The most popular machines are the treadmills, on which grimly trudging men and women stare straight ahead or read paperbacks.

San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit takes on gyms and especially the treadmill in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin, 2000). She sees walking as an “indicator species” like endangered frogs; its health is a measure of the state of the ecosystem. Walking, she writes, is an indicator species for other kinds of freedoms and pleasures, such as free time, alluring spaces, and unhindered bodies. She maintains that the body has ceased to be a utilitarian entity for many Americans but is still a recreational one. They occasionally take it for a walk, along with the dog. If walking is an indicator species, the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. The body no longer works, but works out, requiring a gym membership, workout gear, special equipment, and personal trainers.

Solnit sees the treadmill as a corollary to the suburb, a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is nowhere to go. Prison treadmills of the 1820s were used to generate energy for manufacturing, but the modern treadmill’s two-horsepower engine actually consumes energy. On the treadmill, space—as landscape, terrain, spectacle, and experience—has vanished, and bodily exertion is measured in time and caloric output.

Fillmore Street lies half a block from the gym and its treadmillers. A spectacular walk down the steep Fillmore Street hill takes in vast vistas of the bay and white sails, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the Marina District. I carry on through the broad lawn of Fort Mason, past the Benny Bufano Madonna and Child, to Aquatic Park, Fisherman’s Wharf, and down the Embarcadero to the newly renovated World Trade Center adjacent to the Ferry Building. By then, I’ve earned the right to take on a little fuel in the Gelateria.

I haven’t yet mentioned our local Garden of Eden, Golden Gate Park. One of my favorite venues there, the Strybing Arboretum, boasts plants from every region on earth, and you can see magnolias and rhododendrons blossoming at almost any time of the year. The new California Academy of Sciences and De Young Museum buildings, both now under construction, will lie on opposite sides of a pedestrian mall which might even be free of cars, if the parking lot is sited underground where it surely belongs.

The Lancet, a British medical journal, recently ran an editorial titled “Physical activity and obesity” by James Hill, of the University of Colorado. “The nature of human physiology,” he writes, “is such that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a healthy bodyweight with a low level of physical activity.” The average American citizen is putting on about two pounds each year. Walking a mile a day would prevent this weight gain, according to Hill. In the same issue of the Lancet, Physician John Reilly reports that modern British children are establishing a sedentary lifestyle as early as three: eating fast foods, watching TV, and not playing outside. He forecasts an epidemic of obesity that will rival the one already underway in the United States, where two-thirds of adults are overweight and one-third obese.

For me, walking is a pleasure, but its health benefits are well established. Regular walkers have far fewer heart attacks and strokes, lower blood pressure, less diabetes and colon cancer, stronger bones with reduced risk of osteoporosis and hip fractures, improved balance, coordination, and joint flexibility. They live longer and even have less of a chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

How can so many people deprive themselves of an activity that requires so little effort for so much benefit, in the city that Tony Kushner, in his play “Angels in America,” depicts as heaven?

Everybody is busy, of course, speeding from suburb to city and from one meeting place to another. Most “just don’t have the time” to walk. But as Rebecca Solnit says, the human mind, like the human body, wasn’t designed to go much faster than three miles per hour. Habitual upright two-legged locomotion was the first trait to distinguish our ancestors from the apes about five million years ago.

Since its origin in Africa about 150,000 years ago, our species has made its living by ranging widely to gather and hunt. The San Bushmen of southern Africa, thought to live most like our ancient forebears, readily walk seven to ten miles a day. You can’t gain much weight on that regimen, no matter how much you eat. Our bodies and our brains evolved for that kind of life, not for McDonald’s, SUVs, and six hours a day in front of the tube.

Our minds and bodies rebel at the counter-evolutionary lifestyle we are leading: the immobility, the overeating, and the force-feeding of information that gives our 3-mph-brains indigestion. In theory, we’re obsessed with the concept of what is “natural.” We clean the supermarket shelves of factory-made products with that “natural” label and swallow megatons of “natural” nostrums that are mostly useless or actually harmful.

Walking on our own two feet, an activity that defines our species, is the most natural and healthy thing a human being can do, but most of us are choosing to do as little of it as possible.

Since the 1970s, the Federal Government has spent billions subsidizing the production of ethanol as a gasoline additive. The program’s supporters argue it reduces our dependence on foreign oil, despite the assessment of the Department of Agriculture, the General Accounting Office, and the Congressional Budget Office that these subsidies are a costly political boondoggle pandering to corn farmers, with almost no public benefit.

Instead of an ethanol program, we should have a national walkahol program. We can fill our tanks with walkahol free of charge. In fact, it already offers discount coupons good at the doctor’s, the service station, and, of course, the gym. It burns fat instead of fossil fuels, it cuts the cost of medical care, and it adds immeasurably to the grace of living, especially if you live in San Francisco. It’s a natural!