Published: March 10, 2009 06:38 pm      

GESENHUES: Walk this way

Warmer weather and the time change has made the way for perfect walking conditions. I love to walk. When I lived in New Albany, my walking partner and I covered every street within the city limits and few outside of them as well.

One year, I took regular walks from my home along Spring Street to the top of the Knobs via Old Vincennes, Spickert Knob Road and Moser Knob Road. I was training for a 60-mile walk to raise money for breast cancer research — it was three days, 20-miles a day. I didn’t have any kids then and could invest a whole half day to whatever I wanted. I chose walking.

As a mom of two, I have to search out my walking hours — or steal them. Early mornings are best, but I don’t do them if it’s too cold out or the sun hasn’t come up yet. Now, with the time change, it will get brighter just a bit earlier. Spring is near, too, so more warm mornings will be showing up with the sunrise. Walking will be my new way to start the day, as opposed to my three cups of coffee. With a walk, one cup should do me fine, at least until after lunch.

I’ve always wanted to be a runner, but I never liked it as much as walking. In fact, I loathe running. When I have tried to jog, the only thing I think about while doing it is when I can stop. I play that game, just jog to the next sign, to that house, to the end of this road. Nothing works. My mind never strays from how far I have to go before I can stop.

Walking is a much different experience for me. It’s mediation. Ideas show up that turn into goals that turn into ways I improve my life. I work out problems (Walk out problems?) and come up with answers to questions I forgot I had.

Walking is one of my favorite ways to soothe the ground between me and my husband after a heated conversation. I’m almost always less likely to yell about who does more around the house once I’ve taken a walk. The ironic thing is that my husband and I can’t walk together. His choice of conversation never works with my stream-of-walking thought process.

When we tried walking as a couple many years ago, he would always bring up subjects I didn’t consider walk-talk appropriate, like our budget: what we had spent that week, what we needed to save, all matters on what to do with money. Ugh, just typing it wears me out. It was like taking the most stressful marriage talk and trying to do it during an activity that was all about stress reduction. He might as well have showed up at my yoga classes and asked me about our taxes. On more than one occasion, we would end up walking in opposite directions before our walk was finished, neither of us able to keep pace or patience with the other. Now, we just don’t walk together.

My walking partner was a different story. She lived less than a mile from me, and the start of our walks was always halfway in between our two houses. We would walk to our meeting place and then continue walking until we had solved the spiritual crisis of the day or laughed until our sides hurt too much to walk anymore. We never ran out of topics to keep us distracted from the number of miles we covered. Marriage, family, friends, work and the future were all fair game for our walk-talks.

Now my walking partner and I live more than 20 miles apart and walking to a middle place is unrealistic, especially with kids to boot. Most of my walks in recent years are done solo. Walking solo works well for me since it’s the only time I get to be alone, and that counts being in the bathroom. (I have learned that kids have no qualms about asking you what’s for dinner, no matter where you happen to be sitting.)

So with our new, happy, friendly and warm weather, I’m going to be taking it to the roads again. My goal is to walk enough that my shoe treads will wear thin by mid-June. I wouldn’t mind my legs wearing thin as well.