Walking

Brisk walking helps reduce body fat, lower blood pressure, and increase high-density lipoprotein.h The longest walk around the world was completed by a former neon-sign salesman, Jean Beliveau. He walked 46,600 miles around 64 countries. The trip took him 11 years.l Fire walking, or the act of walking over hot stones or embers with bare feet, is a religious ceremony practiced in several parts of the world, including the Indian subcontinent, China, Fiji Islands, New Zealand. It was also practiced in ancient Greece and India. Fire walking is said to help guarantee a good harvest or purify the participants.k Racewalking has been an official Olympic sport or over 90 years. Distances vary from 1 mile to 95 miles. Racewalking usually is not the most popular sport of the Olympics.j Modern literary theorists see a similarity between walking and writing. As Michel de Certeau observes, “writing is one way of making the world our own, and walking is another.”m The average Japanese takes 7,168 steps per day The United States walks the least of any industrialized nation. The average Australian takes 9, 695 steps per day (just a few short of the ideal 10,000), the average Japanese takes 7,168; the average Swiss: 9,650; and the average American just 5,117.o In modern traffic engineering, pedestrians have often been described as “pedestrian impedance,” or “vehicular delay.” Researchers note that walking has become a casualty of modern life. With the loss of walking as a cultural activity, there is a loss of an ancient and profound relationship with the body, world, and imagination.o Given that the world is about 25,000 miles in circumference and that the average walking rate is 3 miles per hour, it would take a person walking nonstop approximately 347 days to walk around the world.h It would take about 225 million years to walk one light-year at the pace of a 20-minute mile. It would take 95,000 years to travel one light-year on NASA’s Mach 9.68 X-43, a hypersonic scramjet that is the fastest aircraft in the wild. One light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles.c A typical pair of tennis shoes will last 500 miles of walking.c