By Paul Carrier
What we have here is a quick read that makes you want to slip on your shoes and head out for a stroll, a jaunt, a hike or, if you're feeling too droopy to pick up the pace, an easy saunter around the block.
The Lost Art of Walking details some of the more exotic preoccupations that have consumed walking aficionados over the years, such as the once-popular practice of strolling one mile per hour for 1,000 consecutive hours.
That may not sound like much until you realize that it left little time for sleeping, eating, or much of anything else, and then only in short snippets. Think about it. Fifteen minutes on foot, followed by 45 minutes of down time, followed by 15 minutes pounding the pavement, followed by a 45-minute break, etc., for 1,000 hours. Rather grueling, actually.
One way around that "dilemma," it turns out, was to carefully orchestrate the walks to create larger blocks of free time. Here's how it worked. If you walk for 15 minutes at the very beginning of the first hour and then wait until the last quarter of the second hour to hit the streets yet again, you can squeeze in a 90-minute break between the two walks.
Still, a very odd obsession, if you ask me. The phenomenon struck me as yet another example of our mind-boggling penchant for wasting time, which can be especially problematic for people who have compulsive personalities.
I found the author's accounts of his own rambles in London and elsewhere far more interesting than some of the more esoteric information about walking that is included in the book, which reads like a sometimes awkward blend of memoir, history and trivia.
The end result, for me, was an entertaining but uneven and poorly focused look at the sometimes not-so-simple pleasure of putting one foot down in front of the other. Not surprisingly, considering those shortcomings, The Lost Art of Walking did a better job of holding my attention at some points than at others.
It did make me want to get out there and hoof it, though, so that's a plus.
