Recently in Walking Category

After a winter's-worth of flesh-numbing cold last week, I was finally able to get out and hoof it to the office this morning. I was rewarded with another sighting of the red-tailed hawk I've mentioned here earlier. Walking up 46th Street, about a block from the bridge, I heard crows cawing and cast a glance just above and to my right, where, perched majestically in a scrub oak not 15 feet from where I stood, the hawk was absorbing a blistering critique from a single audacious crow. I stopped to watch for a moment, until the hawk took its leave, the crow nipping at its heels.

It was the second time in three days that I'd crossed paths with the big bird. On Saturday, instead of heading back to the rink to skate, I decided to let my blister heal and took Brigit, the family dog, for a long walk. We covered maybe two or so miles in the course of 40 minutes, (Brigit is never in a hurry; she likes to stop and smell the urine) making a circuit from 54th Street to Minnehaha Park at 50th, took a bit of a detour to explore the bridge spanning the Minnehaha Creek gorge and connecting the park with the state's veteran's home, before heading south again along the parkway. Against the gray sky, I spied the hawk, which swooped overhead, buffeted by a nasty northwest wind that was beginning to spit sleet.

 Brigit and I made our way past the dog park without incident (she is not always sociable), and I pulled my cap down lower over my ears against the wind as we trekked up the snow-packed sidewalk toward home.

My two older brothers (64 and 61) do not suffer winter gladly. Because they can, (one is retired, the other semi-retired), they make for warmer climes in their RVs as soon as the holidays appear in their rear-view mirrors. Currently, they're happily ensconced in the vicinity of Ft. Myers, Fla., no doubt checking the weather reports on their laptops and basking in their excellent winter latitude. I'm happy for them. Really I am. But, I'm beginning to understand that the key to surviving a Minnesota winter is not to shrink from it, but to experience it wholeheartedly.

Except when you have to go to the gym, which I did both Friday night and earlier this evening. It's plenty warm down there and you get to sweat in a way that's hard to replicate at 10 below. And I did so Friday -- to an extent that left me stiff and sore all weekend. By this evening, I was pretty much back to normal and ran through my routine with little trouble (five minutes on the bike had my left knee barking, so I moved over to the Elliptical Death Machine) and left feeling every bit as happy as a brisk walk in the park -- without the frostbite.

I spent the weekend putzing around the house and avoiding the gym, but I was on my feet too much, and my tweaky left knee by Sunday evening had morphed from its usual benign tweakiness to a state of painful immobility that had me wondering whether I was going to be able to walk to work on Monday.

This may seem like an odd concern, I'll admit, given that the Dark Times have presently descended upon the city and our frosty, sub-freezing mornings and their seasonally appropriate northwesterly gales were certain to greet me the next morning. But, it's too cold for bicycling and the Crapmobile is, well, the Crapmobile, and the change in season has me in its thrall. I just want to get out in it every morning.

My knee's still a bit stiff when I awake on Monday, but I count as a good omen the fact that, when I slip on the frost-covered steps heading toward the street I do not go airborne. A block later, everything is loosening up nicely. I'm not really clear on why challenging your tweaky joints has the effect of making them less tweaky, but that seems to be what occurs on these occasions. For the half-hour or so that it takes for me to trek across the frozen lawn of Minnehaha Park, over the Intercity Bridge and up the hill to my St. Paul office, all my appendages are willingly cooperating with one another.

It all feeds this minor delusion I entertain -- that as long as I keep moving, I'm going to be OK. Or, as my old friend, Dan, puts it: "I want to live forever. So far, so good."

It's a bracing zero degrees this morning as I set off for work, but -- mercifully -- there's no wind to speak of, which makes for a splendid amble through the park. I even took a moment to stretch my calves at the foot of the stairs that take me to 46th Street and the Ford Bridge.

On gym days like today (I've resurrected my Life Time Fitness backpack so I can carry both my gym gear and my computer in one handy carry-all), I haven't normally been walking to work, figuring that I get my cardio in the club. So now I'm faced with a bit of a conundrum: Should I still do my 25 minutes on the bike or treadmill or elliptical machines? I suppose it can't hurt, since my knee feels fine. (Just thinking out loud.) Plus, that cardio time sort of loosens me up in a way that seems to make my lifting routine more plausible. I would say "effective," but who knows if what I'm doing is all that effective? Don't think I'll walk home tonight, though.

I've been a pretty faithful bicycle commuter for the past 30-some years. But, when the first big snow falls here in the Twin Cities, I typically park my bicycle in the garage and rely on the automobile to get to work. I've taken enough spills on the ice over the years to convince me that it's the most prudent approach. Usually, I'm back on the road by April.

This year, the first snow began piling up in late November, but owing to my new commitment to fitness -- and the relative proximity of our new St. Paul offices to my South Minneapolis home -- I've been walking to and from work on a semi-regular basis. The two-and-a-half-mile jaunt takes me past Minneapolis's only light rail line, through pastoral Minnehaha Park (above, during warmer times) and across the graceful Ford Bridge (which spans the Mississippi River, overlooking the Ford Dam, which powers -- you guessed it -- the Ford auto plant) in St. Paul.

The whole trip takes about 35 minutes from door to door and, while it can be pretty bracing when the mercury dips below zero (as it did yesterday morning), it's about the most invigorating morning exercise I can imagine. One thing I've learned about my aging carcass in the past year is how little my bicycle riding actually works my body. Yeah, my quads and hamstrings are OK (though not exactly supple), and I get the sense that some parts of my upper body benefit from my pedaling, but the first time I jumped on the treadmill at the club I could tell that nothing I had been doing on my bike had really prepared me for running -- or even walking. My calves were seizing up, my knees were throbbing and my feet were barking.

Since I began walking regularly, though, I can feel those muscles rounding into shape a little bit. Plus, when the temperature allows me to free my mittened hands from my pockets, my arms can get to swinging in a way that feels pretty productive. Cycling aficionados argue that their activity is a better cardio workout (especially if you're going uphill), and they might be right. But at the speed I tend to ride during the non-ice seasons (less than 10 mph), I seldom find myself huffing and puffing (except on those damn hills or in the clutches of a 30 mph NW wind).

The folks at coolnurse.com calculate the calorie-burning potential of each mode of transport, and to my way of thinking it's pretty much a wash (walking: 61 calores per 10 minutes for an average-sized guy; cycling: 74). But I'm not really counting calories (yet); the whole walking thing is maybe as much psychological as it is physical. After years of opening a garage door and either climbing onto my bike or into my car to get to work, there's something really refreshing about simply slinging my bag over my shoulder, closing the front door behind me and just striding off to work pretty much unencumbered by the vagaries of a wheeled vehicle.

It helps, of course, that my route passes through a quiet residential neighborhood, a verdant park and over a majestic river. Research has indicated that simply being in nature can produce beneficial health outcomes. As Karen Olson points out in a June 2006 piece in EL, this walk in the woods can lower my blood pressure and bad cholesterol while boosting my immune system.

I'm a real sucker for a fitness program that's also practical (exercising while commuting really fits that bill), so this walking to work idea is probably one that I'll stick with for a while. It's not going to replace sweating on the treadmill or the stationary bike, but I'm guessing it'll keep me in the right frame of mind for those days when the gym is beckoning.