The Emotional Payback of Walking

How I Discovered the Emotional Benefits of Walking

It was only when I hurt my knee this year, and had to stop taking my morning fitness walks, that I felt truly constrained by injury. The other physical activities I had enjoyed before-aerobics, hiking along the Pacific coast-also left me with a piercing pain in my knee that even a cold compress couldn't totally heal.

The frustrating thing about the injury was that it hadn't happened while I was pursuing a strenuous sport-so I couldn't brag or get pity for it-but when I simply crouched down low to clean out the cat litter boxes at home. As I bent down, I suddenly felt a sharp, knife-like pain go through my knee.

After six weeks of enforced rest, the knee didn't feel any better, so I returned to my doctor. He probed my knee with a gentle hand and looked at me skeptically.

"How old are you?"

"Forty-nine," I replied.

"The knee is the weakest joint in the body," he said. "And when we get older, it just takes longer to cure an injury there."

But I was impatient, and wanted to get back to the demanding "walk aerobics" videotape I was using to control my weight, one I hoped would sweat inches off my butt and hips. On the VCR, the instructor would demonstrate quick marching steps and kicks as I followed along in my bedroom. "You can feel that in the hip and thigh," she said as she did energetic knee lifts.

I also missed my challenging walking tours up the steep hills of my town. Those walks gave me energy and a sense of purpose. Even on the worst of days, a morning walk lifted my mood high- once those endorphins kicked in. "Exercise is my antidepressant," my best friend told me once, and after taking up daily walking two years ago, I found that I agreed.

"But no aerobics," my doctor told me, disregarding my frown. "And you can walk for exercise, but slowly, and not up steep hills."

It was difficult, but I finally found a suitable walking path that traveled mostly over flat land in my hilly town. During my first practice run, being forced to take it easy made me decidedly grumpy.

The path I walked was hardly scenic. It would toward the BART station, behind a tire store, and through a trendy shopping center with a popular J.R. Muggs coffee shop.