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Monday, March 07, 2005
Cuizon: Keep walking
By Erma Cuizon
Bird by Bird
HABITS in the city could become so sedentary, we’re bound to get heart diseases for lack of exercise. I try to turn it around, but quite feebly, by walking in the yard along rows of plant pots or just around the room in a silly jog. I tried the doctor’s stress test and I almost fell on my nose at the end of it. But I’m convinced about the truth of it.
Today, I’d like to talk the walk.
A story still goes among our clan that an uncle (God bless him) walked regularly from Mandaue to Cebu City to see his girl (my aunt). It’s said he’d walk alone following the then intact relis and made the chore easier by an occasional leap and kick along the train track, he probably sang to himself. That was before World War II, Grandma said.
I knew someone in the ‘60s whose habit it was to walk from the middle of the city to the pier at sundown. Probably that was a time when the corners he passed by were safe, the weather not too hot and no one grabbed his watch at the pier. When he went to Manila, he loved it even more—he could walk covering more areas from Quezon City to Luneta without let. At nightfall, he found himself at the Manila Bay.
What was more, it was a leisurely walk because he had all the time, being only a visitor in the city.
“I don’t like Cebu anymore,” he then said after that. “The way to the pier is short.”
He finally left Cebu for Manila to finish his medical course. After he graduated, he left for New York and he loved the stretch of ground there and all the attractions along the way.
Talking of New York, a New Yorker in 1954 started walking for a total of 3,000 blocks and 500 miles in Manhattan. A retired navy officer at 65, he turned his weekend strolls into a four-year project.
Fifty years after, 34-year-old Caleb Smith read about this navy man in an old issue of the New York Times and thought of going into the same thing. He walked on weekends but also two hours after office time when it was summer.
By this time, he had fallen even more in love with New York and decided to record his experience in a web site (NewYorkCityWalk.com). He walked the streets, covering all corners, for 31 months—used and destroyed four pairs of shoes, and cost him one girl friend (or not exactly that way but he lost her). He had only one mugging incident, probably while walking through Central Park.
On his last untravelled block—33rd St. between Fifth Ave. and Broadway, he invited friends to watch him. At the finish line, they shivered in the rain.
It doesn’t have to be New York but you must do some walking, says the doctor. It’s certainly a walk for a cause (and how!) but it’s also called “heart walk.”
(emc(at)sunstar(dot)com(dot)ph)
(March 7, 2005 issue)
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