30 Day Mediterranean Lifestyle Challenge
Gary Dunham is ASHA's Director of Publications. He walks to and from work, so he has that part of Mediterranean lifestyle down pat. We often imagine having to toil away at a gym for hours or start training for a marathon to get "in shape," but studies show that their are huge health benefits to simply moving more.
- Long, slow walks may beat, shorter higher intensity activities
- What do you mean an hour at the gym doesn't counteract a sedentary job?
- Can you limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23 and 1/2 hours per day?
- Sitting will kill you. Can mobile save us?
When this challenge is complete, I'll seriously look into making some standing and walking desks available around the office. In the meantime, enjoy Gary's story of how walking can transform you.
Oh, and
nearly everyone walked. Everywhere.
Come
sunrise, from our crow’s nest residence in the walled hill town of Murlo, we
archaeologists would see men and women, many leathered and browned by the intense
summer sun, leave their farmyards and citadel homes and head out to the
surrounding gardens, vineyards, and flock pastures. Some, often accompanied by
children, walked to the larger, nearby town of Vescovado with its produce and
craft shops, some two miles away, carrying baskets and cloth sacks. Still
others walked to houses to visit, gossip, or help (there were few phones there,
then). We would follow in turn, hiking nearly two miles along a dirt road and
then two more up ancient terraced slopes to the site. In the evening, tired and
in full retreat, we made our ways back to the lit, warm places.
All of us
walked nearly everywhere during those months, and it perfectly fit the life we
were living. Walking infuses a majestic yet intimate tempo into a Mediterranean
lifestyle through the most primal rhythm of all: the bipedal motion of our
bodies, moving deliberately across the physical landscape. The rhythm of each journey
is encompassing and universal; each cadence our own. For those Tuscan farmers
and villagers, walking was the linchpin and underscore of their lifestyle, an
inexorable but oh-so-gentle rhythm predictably orchestrating and cohering the
way they carved up days and engaged with the land, particular needs, and each
other. The motion of individual bodies, the idiosyncratic rhythm of wear and
tear on muscles, rather than an array of telecommunications and vehicles at
hand, mapped out and knitted together each person’s social and physical worlds.
Walking connected the dinner table to the harvesting row, the butcher’s shop to
the kitchen, a friend’s portico to
the rocking chairs sitting on one’s own porch. Walking also beautifully measured
and moored the surrounding space of Tuscany in time, a highly personalized,
physiologically-based time established by everyone’s own unique cadence. For
some, the lower pasture might have been a 30 minute walk away while the baker
remained 45 minutes out; others temporalized those distances and valued the
destinations differently. Walking in addition uncompromisingly matched and bound
the villagers and us on a completely physical level with objects such as tools
and foodstuffs—the question became less what one wanted for supper or needed at the site and
more how much was one capable of carrying for how long?
For me, embracing
a walking-based lifestyle in Italy also rekindled a precious moment from
yesteryear. As a child growing up in the granite-strewn hills and mountains of
western Maine, I would walk on and alongside the gray, lichen-etched stonewalls
built long ago by my ancestors, practicing presentations and mentally writing
papers for school. Disfluent since the age of six, I struggled then with
speaking on a daily basis. The forward-impelling rhythm of walking stonewalls across
our hardscrabble farm, pacing and stepping from one cold, carefully stacked
stone to another, helped move me beyond the treacherous verbal sticking points
and away from an emotionally explosive household. Walking centered me, making
me happy, creative, as fluent as an untreated stutterer could possibly be, and
emotionally the most whole I ever was as a child. It was thus easy and
gratifying in Italy to return to that sense of wellness resonating on so many
levels. As I walked to and from the site and into town, I’d fall into the old
pasture gait rhythm, with the words inside flowing forth. Lucky me. An
astonishing number of field reports, papers, and songs were composed in my head
(I have remarkable visual recall) while walking across the fields and groves of
Tuscany.
The
rightness and deep satisfaction of that magnificently natural, gentle rhythm stayed
with me long after I returned from overseas. After entering graduate school at
the University of Virginia, I continued walking daily and weekly routines when
I could—to the grocery store, classes, theater, record store (yeah, so sue me, I
was one of the last to convert to CDs), and so forth. I became a field survey
archaeologist, trekking across hill and dale to help pay the bills, and didn’t
buy a car for nearly a decade. When that clunker broke down, I waited five more
years before getting another. Walking had settled deep.
Sadly, the
magic gradually dulled. A fast track publishing career swept me up from
position to position, company to company, car to car; over time, I walked less
and less and lost my cadence, the special connection to the bipedal tempo of my
own body. That is, until 2012, a hellish year of loss, aching loneliness, and a
determined fight to make it all right again.
In January
of that year, my wife and I learned that our oldest daughter living in Omaha,
Nebraska had been diagnosed with an advanced case of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Our
response was immediate and unanimous: My wife, a nurse, quit her new job and
relocated to Omaha to assist and care while our daughter endured the horrors of
chemotherapy. Taillights fading one biting late January morning, I was left
alone with one mandate, one overarching purpose: keep an income coming in for
the family at all cost. And I would have to keep the home fires burning without
a car, as the one vehicle we could afford was needed in Omaha.
So, out of
necessity, I began walking, again. A lot. To and from the neighborhood post
office, barbershop, and grocery and department stores, experiencing and
appreciating more fully the planned community where we lived by relearning how
to measure and map the surrounding social and physical landscapes through the tempo
of my own body in motion. An invisible part of the neighborhood—handy pedestrian
shortcuts, crosswalks, stairs, restaurant seating spilling onto sidewalks and
thus becoming potential hazards to foot traffic—leapt into the foreground. I
also came to acquire once more an intimate physiological relationship to the
produce I ate and supplies I used by becoming acutely aware of just how much I
could carry for how long. For example: OK, dude, it’s fine that you’re
hankering for a pork roast on a mighty fine Saturday afternoon and ready to
heft and shoulder it, but you better make damn sure it’s worth the extra weight
and occupied bag space by stretching the leftovers out over more meals.
More
demanding and stressful were the 4.5 miles hiked each way to work every day, a
distance walked in half the estimated time that public transportation would
take to get me there (don’t ask). I remember vividly the first walk to work,
the morning after my wife had left—surreal and adrift, small and powerless,
vulnerable and alone, despising what our lives were becoming. Head down and
jacket turned up against the raw winter wind and being seen, I trudged down a series
of seemingly interminable sidewalks lined with trash and carcasses alongside a
highway while cars and trucks thundered and buffeted past, leaving me farther
and farther behind. I felt that everyone had a place to be and the freedom of
choice in where they could go, except me, condemned to this necessary back-and-forth
for who knew how long. Reaching work while it was still dark, I slipped into
the building through the parking garage, an enter-and-exit strategy I used for
months to avoid pity and calling attention to our predicament.
Boy oh boy, I
so much hated that walk to work during that long, bitter winter of 2012, the same
daily steps that seemed to lead only backwards in my life to nowhere. Nonetheless,
every morning, determination and obligation outweighed despair, and I hit the
road. That unending walk signified so much loss and lack of control—steadily
eroding finances, the overwhelming sadness and jagged frustration of a couple
separated by half a continent, and the horrific joke that God was playing on our
daughter. One Friday night slogging my way back, soul-weary and legs-sore, discouraged
and dreading the onslaught of another empty, shatteringly still weekend, I
began sobbing at a busy intersection and missed two walk lights.
I may have felt
unmoored, but my body didn’t. One very bright Thursday morning in late March, the
stonewalls returned, leading the long way back to the center.
While
walking to and from work the previous week, the trek seemed gradually less
burdensome and weirdly also took a bit longer. Add that change to the fact that
increasingly while walking to work, I was mentally reviewing the day’s
itinerary and noticing less the traffic and litter. The same in reverse: In the
evenings, I started thinking about a new recipe to tackle or current home
project while following that busy highway back.
Come that
Thursday morning, I recall crossing the highway to the sidewalk, and
then…well…I thought of a report I needed to write by noon and began composing
it in my head. Finished, still walking, and strangely content, I looked up and
realized that I had traveled over a mile while mentally creating the report;
glancing back down, I suddenly, shockingly understood that my slower-than-usual
gait was rhythmically matching the end-on-end placement of concrete blocks on
the sidewalk.
Oh my
goodness—I was walking stonewalls again. My body and mind had slipped back into
the decades old rhythm of the Maine pasture gait, coming together finally again
as a creative, centering process of composition.
After that
morning, everything changed. The walk to work became more and more mine, an
opportunity to write, express, and observe, a daily bridge of creativity binding
office and home, and helping to center myself within this particular transitional
point in life.
Flash
forward nearly one year, and our daughter is in remission, our family is
putting together the pieces, and I still walk to work. Why?
I walk
because I appreciate differently and more deeply now the world around me. Gaze
no longer lowered and moving slower and rhythmically across 4.5 miles, by the spring
of last year, I started naturalizing and personalizing what could be considered
a seemingly interchangeable and reducible stretch of suburban Maryland by really
seeing and listening to what was going on beyond the litter-rim.
As the
months rolled forth, a different, more natural Maryland began to emerge on my
walks, a flipside Land of Mary made up of leaf-lined hollows, fern-swallowed
swales, soft-lit glens and vales, tumbling creeks, and pooling backwaters nestling
between the dangerously urgent, hard
places; a green, teeming Land of Mary where creatures largely keep to
themselves in plain sight. I know where a mother woodchuck raises a family on a
highway bank; I have seen the brown hawks circling overhead and know where they
roost and swoop down on field mice living on highway trash; I have knelt behind
a fallen log, drenched and cradling the shredded membranes of an umbrella,
while watching a doe nuzzling her fawn as lightning crackled and danced around
us; I have been greeted by dozens of turtle heads synchronously breaking the
surface of a side pond on a searing July afternoon, mouths opening in delight;
and I know now absolutely, certainly, without a doubt to never, ever come
between a hungry turkey vulture and its gray squirrel breakfast.
I still walk
because for over a year I have personalized and rooted this 4.5 miles with
experience and memory, and am eager to learn more. It’s come alive. There’s the
intersection where an antique tractor barrel-assed through one foggy morning;
there’s the cross-walk where I was nearly hit by a Doritos truck (obituary
headline: Middle-aged Man Cashes in Chips); and another intersection where I
responded to a bullying, revved up truck with the most appropriate non-verbal
gesture. There’s the drain hole cover where I picked up a smelly,
goobly-encrusted black glove, thinking it was the missing mate for one of mine,
and then lugged the stinking thing for four miles back home only to discover it
was for the wrong hand. Gorgeous live piano music drifts down regularly from
one apartment complex; an extremely yippity and miniscule
French-something-or-another canine races a white wooden fence back and forth in
front of another. There’s the bus stop midway where kind-hearted bus drivers
would see me approach and wait—they now recognize me and wave. And, I see the pitted
knoll where, on late afternoons an overly enthusiastic condo owner attempts to
get Mimi his German shepherd to do her business by pointing his finger right
next to her arse, hopping up and down, and urging her in a falsetto voice to
“Poop! Poop! Poop!” Soon, I had no choice but to share through writing the
wackiness and wonder experienced during those walks across the Land of Mary.
I walk
because the rhythm of uninterrupted cadence returns my best writing, my
creativity to me. And write I have, developing articles and tackling my memoirs
with renewed flourish. As I used to do with homework, the morning walk to work
prepares me for daily presentations, meetings, and reports at the American
Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The return walks home last year became something
charged and special as memories and the ways to tell those stories began gathering,
glistening, and cascading; my afternoon journey alongside the highway often becoming
a veritable aboriginal walkabout tracing and bringing back the songlines of
before. So many times I rush into the apartment brimming with tales by the end
of the home walk. Invariably sitting immediately at the computer, donned jacket
and hat ignored (and sometimes really needing to pee), I begin typing, urgently.
I walk
because I have been on autopilot and shut down for too long and this slower,
deliberate walk is my path, exactly
where I want and need to be, today. I no longer climb corporate rungs or flee
from the long before but have chosen to stop, lay it all on the line, and work hard
for a greater cause and less money. Head held high, I walk exposed, patiently
making my way to the next stoplight in front of hundreds of boxy, exchangeable,
faceless vehicles, the only real, visible person on this highway we share
daily.
And so, dear
reader, we’ve reached the end of our little chat. You’ve just sped past,
perhaps wondering who the hell is walking in the rain, carrying a tattered
umbrella in right hand, worn sack in left, and a hint of a smile. Well, that’s
just me—you guessed it—writing these final lines in my head as I make my long
way home.
No worries.
For the first time in years, I know exactly where my next steps take me.
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