WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU. We want to be encouraged by your successes as you have waged the war against excess weight and other health matters. In each issue of our newsletter we will print one or more stories as we all try to encourage and inspire one another to stay the course. Submissions must be less than 1000 words and may be emailed to peter@speakwell.com ». Please include your name and your city.

The YoYo of Walking
The Scott Williamson Story

WALKING IS NOT SOMETHING to be taken for granted, It has amazing health benefits. Walking is just so natural, so ordinary, so instinctual, even a baby can do it. But there's walking and then there is Scott Williamson's walking.

To call him a 'walker' would be like calling Luciano Pavarotti a crooner or Steve Nash a mere ballplayer. Williamson is a walker extraordinaire. He is what is called a YoYo. "That phrase is used because I'm starting in Mexico, hiking northbound to Canada and turning around and headed all the way back, so it's mimicking the motion of a yoyo," he explains.

Williamson hiked 5,310 miles from Mexico to Canada and back, traversing the wild and wondrous Pacific Crest Trail, the West Coast cousin of the shorter, more famous Appalachian Trail in the east. In the small but growing world of long-distance hiking, Scott Williamson is a rock star.

"The trail's over 2,500 miles long, but it's only about a foot and a half wide," he has said. "So it's a very small community of people who know about me."

He started his trek at the Mexican border May 22, 2006 and hiked 191 days — more than six million steps — over mountain peaks, across raging rivers, through three states, wearing out 13 pair of shoes. "I average 500 miles per pair," he claims.

Williamson is the only person to have previously done a yoyo; he completed his first one in 2004. Filmmakers caught up with him at various points along the way of his second trip and are shooting a documentary, Tell It On the Mountain." They also gave him a camera to capture his extraordinary solo journey. Along the way, he encounters not only jaw-dropping beauty, but also snakes, scorpions, bears and bugs.

"I like to say it's the greatest unplanned adventure you'll ever have," Williamson enthused. "I think just the adventure of it brings me out here and the challenge to push myself 5,300 miles. Your body gets into incredible shape."

Who doesn't want an incredible body? Bob Girandola, Associate Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Southern California College adds, "It would be nice if we could get motivation from this man who walked 5,000 miles, but somebody's going to look at that and say, 'My god, I can't do something like that.' But you don't have to; they only have to do a fraction of that."

Girandola teaches, and some might even say he preaches, the gospel of walking. He put Whitaker on a treadmill at a steady pace of three miles per hour — about the pace Scott Williamson walked. It builds up your heart and burns calories. It can even boost your brain power.

The health benefits of walking increase exponentially the steeper the climb. But for most Americans, the only thing on the rise is their size. The average American adult weighs 25 pounds more today than in 1960. Two out of every three adults are overweight or obese.

"If you can get one good hour of walking a day, I would say that would be great," Girandola said. "Even though it is a miracle exercise, most people, they're lucky if they walk off the couch."

How do you get people off their duffs? Well, motivation can come in many forms. One is the charitable motivation like the March of Dimes Walk-a-Thon. Ever since that first Walk-A-Thon in 1971, more and more people have been walking for a good cause — doing their bodies good, while raising money to fight birth defects, AIDS, and cancer. Few, if any, have done more good deeds walking than Barbara Jo Kirshbaum. She's 68 and did her first Walk-A-Thon ten years ago.

"I think I have walked about 3,700 miles for breast cancer," Kirshbaum said. "Now, I have raised $675,000." Kirshbaum set a record for this cause and her goal is $1 million dollars. She tackles the toughest two- and three-day walks — a feat that surprises even her.

"Being raised in the '50s, I always thought, you know, you didn't break a sweat," Kirshbaum said. "That wasn't a ladylike thing to do and I never did anything that was very physical. I avoided anything very physical."

Today she says she is probably in better shape than she was in her 40s. Keeping up this pace isn't always easy, even for someone as motivated as Kirshbaum. Williamson also has to keep himself motivated to walk through the pain — through scorching sun, rain, hail and cold. When he made it 2,655 miles to Canada, what should have been one of his best days was one of his toughest.

"Because this is extremely difficult mentally to get here and to turn around and start all over again, I use a strategy," he said. "I call them micro-goals. OK, I'm going to hike, walk to that tree and when I reach that tree, I spot another object. Ok, I'm going to walk to that rock. Then OK, I spot something else, I'm walking to that ridge top. And if you do that over and over and over again, for months, pretty soon you've walked over 5,000 miles."

Williamson said the key is to start small with a short walk down the street, if that is all you can do. Gradually increase your distance. The best thing about walking, Girandola said, is that it can be done anywhere and at any time.

"People think, well, I have to go to the gym, you know, I have to find a formal time to work out. I have to find a pool," he said. "They don't have to do that. You know, you can walk anywhere. Everybody can do it. I don't think it's the issue really of can or can't. It's the issue of will I or won't I?"

Williamson goals for 2009: Re-break unassisted speed record on the Pacific Crest Trail with the additional goal of breaking David HortonÕs 66 day assisted record at the same time, but in an unassisted fashion. "Follow your dreams, keep at it, eventually you'll arrive there."

Born to Run: Book Review

by P. M.

THIS IS A PHENOMENAL BOOK, and a must read for anyone who runs. Much more than a book about running shoes, it is a book about regaining the joy that running can bring to your life — why running is more than just a way to keep your weight down and your muscles toned. Running is truly a gift bestowed upon us as human beings.

I'm a miserable runner, and apart from a brief time in graduate school, I haven't run since high school. Walking has been my exercise alternative. Nonetheless, a childhood spent in the Boy Scouts and a youth spent doing prehistoric archaeology have given me an abiding interest in the discipline of hunting, especially the role of dogs in human culture and the tradition of persistence hunting practiced by the !Kung bushmen. In Born to Run, magazine writer McDougall has managed to bring together a tale of endurance running, sports capitalism, evolutionary biology, and Mexican ethnography to create a compelling reading experience — an insight into who we were.

A chance reading of a Spanish language magazine article on the exceptional running achievements of the Tarahumara Indians led the author on a multi-year quest to confirm what seemed counter-intuitive. A tribe of people (men and women) who could run incredible distances well into old age, without exotic diets, footwear, training regimes, warm-ups, etc. etc. Like the !Kung, they were reputed to run down deer through sheer stamina. As an oft-injured runner himself, McDougall simply couldn't believe it. The Copper Canyon area of Mexico, where the Tarahumara live, is a remote, rugged, but increasingly dangerous part of Mexico where drug gangs, dope growers, and resource extraction compete to make life miserable for the natives. The author took considerable risks on his first journey to visit these people, only to discover that a white man had been living, and running, among them for many years — The White Horse — Caballo Blanco.

The story thread running through Born to Run is Caballo Blanco's efforts to assemble a small group of America's elite ultradistance runners to compete in a race through the mountains of Mexico with the best runners of the Tarahumara. Included in the mix are one of the leading American advocates of barefoot running, and the author himself, attempting to recover from years of running injuries by altering his training to mirror Tarahumara methods. In providing a back story for this race, McDougall notes that the Tarahumara once made a huge splash in the running world in the 1990s by twice dominating a brutal high-altitude race in Colorado, the Leadville 100. Then they "disappeared."

By weaving the biographical details of the Western participants in the 2006 race, with the ethnographic literature of the Tarahumara, the author sets the scene for the friendly showdown, a "middle of nowhere" mountain race out of sight of cameras and the world's attention. At the same time, McDougall gets a chance to make his case for the negative effects of high-tech running shoes on runner health and performance ... and for the evolutionary forces that apparently shaped the human frame for endurance running even before our species made tools or used fire.


It's a possibility that our ancestors ran down their prey for tens of thousands of years without leaving a single trace in the archaeological record. Selective forces slowly altered their physiology (large head, springy Achilles tendon, hairless skin, upright posture) in ways that made it simply impossible for game animals to out-run humans. I must admit, I was shocked when the author outlined the limitations of four-legged creatures when it comes to running. For sprints, no problem. For long distances, however, the humans win. When added to the advanced cognition required for tracking and predicting game movement (proposed by South African scholar, Louis Liebenberg), one school of scholars now firmly proposes the "Running Man" theory of human evolution — that we are literally born to run down animals. That is our niche in the world.

So this book is a skillful mix of adventure tale, archival research, plus interviews with running coaches, physiologists, race directors, and evolutionary biologists ... culminating in that "secret" race in Mexico in 2006. Interestingly enough, the book has no photos, no maps, no URLs. But two minutes of Googling uncovered photos of the race itself. For the first fifty pages of this book, I assumed we were in for another hoax or scholarly flim-flam along the lines of Carlos Castenada's shamanistic voyage through the Yaqui Indians. But as I read further, the author didn't stray into "magical realism," though he was using the tools and tricks of outdoor adventure/extreme sport writing to add drama and vitality to a subject area that was plenty fascinating on its own.

Ultimately, where McDougall succeeds most in this book for me as a runner is that he really made me think about why it is that I love running. I listened to the last bit of the book while on my final 20-mile training run for the Vermont City Marathon, and it helped me through what turned out to be a really tough run. He makes you realize that getting caught up in pace, distance, etc. can sidetrack you from the real joy of running, and he reinforced my belief that when we run, we are really running for ourselves — we run because we're supposed to.

McDougall's comment about the Copper Canyon race that he was "running against the course" really rang true for me. I know that I have no chance at winning a marathon, so why do I compete? I do so because I can challenge myself against the course, and I do so because I love running. This book also made me think about my running shoes, and I've already purchased a pair of Nike Free 3.0's in the hopes of transitioning into a more minimalist style of running, and I may give the Vibram Fivefingers a try at some point down the road. Finally, I liked this book because it makes me want to run a 50-mile ultramarathon, and if a book can accomplish that feat, you know that it has to be good.

So if you're a runner now or hope to become one, this book is absolutely a must read. I would rank it as the most enjoyable running book that I have read, and probably one of the best books of any kind that I've read in a long time. I urge you to check it out — you won't be disappointed.

One Thousand

 by Peter Mason

One thousand is a great number. It is substantial. It is a number that seems to turn up in a lot of different places. A thousand dollars is a lot of money (to me anyway).

Baseball players rate their batting average in relation to a thousand. My friend, Brent, who is a motorcycle nut rode 1000 miles in a 24-hour period of time and thus joined the elite group of “Iron Butt” riders.

Some other references/uses of ‘one thousand’ are:

• A picture is worth a thousand words
• A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step
• One Thousand and One Nights — a 12 book volume of stories
• Kilometer — 1000 meters
• Kilogram — 1000 grams
• Millennium — 1000 years
• A ‘grand’ — slang for a $1000

I could go on but you get my point. But let me give you just one more example.

In late August I achieved the milestone of 1000 consecutive days of walking 10,000 steps or more.

If you are wondering what 1000 days of walking is equivalent to, the answer is:

• 2.74 years
• 83.33 months
• 142.86 weeks

... and in my case, almost 15 million steps, almost 12 thousand kilometers and a daily average just in excess of 15,000 steps.

I would invite you to join me and begin your own journey of 1000 consecutive days of walking. Make it your non-negotiable. Your heart (as well as the rest of your body) will tell you it is a great club to belong to!