Look gorgeous with only two products

W A L K T H I S WA Y

A simple stroll can change your mood, your health, even your relationships. Read on for advice and inspiration that will get you on the best path.

H o w W a l k i n g C h a n g e d M e

W A L K I N G T O H E A L

By Jasmine Guillory

F I V E Y E A R S A G O this past July, I woke up from a six-hour surgery to remove a massive tumor on my right ovary that all my doctors believed was cancerous, only to find out it was benign. I’d spent the months before my surgery unable to think beyond the summer; I used all my strength just to get up every day and pretend to the outside world that I was OK. After five days in the hospital and a week with family, I went back home to figure out what life looked like without a black cloud over my future. Once the joy and relief faded, life looked pretty empty. I’d left my legal job a few months before and didn’t know if I even wanted to be a lawyer anymore. I’d dreamed of becoming a writer, but with a pile of rejections of my first novel and a stalled attempt on a second, I didn’t think that dream would come true. It felt wrong to be depressed and hopeless so soon after learning I didn’t have cancer, but I was.

The only thing that got me out of my apartment in those first few months after surgery was the need to walk my sister’s German shepherd, Lucy, while my sister was at her new, post-grad-school job all day. I was still pretty weak, and I’ve never been a person who liked exercise, but I couldn’t say no to the dog.

So once a day, Lucy and I would go for a walk. I started out unable to do much more than take her, very slowly, around the block. Every day, I got a tiny bit stronger, and soon I could get us all the way to the playground half a mile away and back. I listened to podcasts, waved at the neighbors I grew to recognize, and enjoyed the early fall Oakland, California, sunshine. For a while, that daily walk with Lucy was the only thing that gave structure to my day. I missed it so much on weekends that I started taking walks in my neighborhood alone.

Those walks helped bring life back to me. One day, just after walking Lucy, I applied for a short-term job unlike any job I’d ever had, because I had nothing to lose. I got that job, which lasted three years instead of two weeks. I started writing again—not a book, not yet, but small things that helped me think of myself as someone who could be a writer.

I now work full-time, with two books to promote and another to write. My sister and Lucy live an hour away, and it’s gotten harder to find time to take walks. Sometimes I get Lucy for the weekend, and when she wakes me up ready to go outside, I’m pretty grumpy about it. But those mornings also make me remember how much going for a walk, even a short one, makes my whole day better.

Guillory is the author of The Wedding Date and the upcoming The Proposal, which will be published September 4.

W A L K I N G T O W O R R Y L E S S

By Kathleen Alcott

F O R A S L O N G A S I have had an imagination, it has carried me places meaningful and frightening, snagging always on potential catastrophe. There has only ever been one cure for this anxiety, and it is to walk at sunset. Watching the light go through the windows gives me the terrible feeling that I’ve missed something, but feeling it fade, out in the weather, makes me feel I’ve been a part of it.

I remember the first time I noticed this fear in myself: I was about 6, and my father had taken me to a matinee. As we emerged into the darkened parking lot, I started to bawl, having the strange feeling the world as I knew it had shifted unalterably without my knowing. The next day, as the sun went down, he made a point of our being witness to it. We went on a walk.

In my small hometown in Northern California, where I came to be known as the Little Girl Who Walked, the wooden

1 0 Wa y s t o M a k e Wa l k i n g M o r e F u n

By Michele Stanten

1

MAKE SOMEONE’S DAY. Instead of a simple hello, Sarah Schwallier, 33, who leads walking groups in Westminster, Colorado, offers compliments to those she passes. She’ll say something like “Your bright shirt makes me happy.” The smiles motivate her to keep going.

3

FIND YOUR CREW. We’ve all heard that exercising with others can keep you more accountable. But you don’t have to grab the same workout buddy every time. Dianne Broad, 53, of Toronto, shakes things up: Three days a week, she walks with a different friend each day, and on weekends, she joins a bigger group of four or five others. “It’s a source of support, whether for life issues, like raising kids or caring for aging parents, or just dealing with injuries or training for a race,” she says. To find a group, visit meetup.com.

2

JOURNAL YOUR WALKS. People who track their workout intentions are more likely to follow through with them, says David Sabgir, MD, 48, a cardiologist in Westerville, Ohio, who started Walk with a Doc, a network of doctor-led walking groups across the U.S. and abroad. “It’s fun to go back and look at all the miles you’ve logged,” he says. Try Penzu (penzu.com) if you prefer a digital diary.

4

LISTEN ONLY WHILE YOU WALK. Bookworm Kristie Bittleston, 44, of Concord, North Carolina, has a rule: If she wants to find out what happens next in the audiobook she’s listening to, she has to lace up her sneakers. “It motivates me to get out the door,” she says. “Long walks give me a chance to listen to a good book or a motivational podcast. It’s treasured quiet time.”

5

DO A WALKING REHEARSAL. If there’s an important presentation or tough conversation in your future, practice it while you walk. When Beverly Smith, 48, of Winterport, Maine, was cast in a community theater production of On Golden Pond, she recorded the lines on her phone and rehearsed during long walks. One reason it was better than running lines in the mirror: “Moving as I rehearsed my lines seemed to help me feel more comfortable moving onstage as I delivered them,” she says.

6

HELP OTHERS. When Ben Pobjoy, 37, of Toronto, started walking to work in an effort to improve his health, he observed things he had missed while whizzing by in a car—notably, hungry people. That’s why he started to make sandwiches and hand them out along his walks. “It allows me to do a bit of good in the community,” he says. Another way to help while you walk: Use the app Charity Miles (free; iOS and Android), which directs corporate sponsors’ dollars to your selected charity for each mile you log. Victorian houses took on another quality at dusk, the reds and golds and lilacs of the trim becoming softer, putting me in mind of artfully iced cakes. The slow river changed too, looking less brown and more green. The world was becoming diferent, as it did every night, but I held the magical belief that if I watched it, I would become diferent too, a girl who didn’t worry in bed about the absence of her parents—reporters who were often gone on a deadline until late—or the things she was learning in school that scared her, that people killed others because they were diferent, that the earth had frozen before and would someday freeze again. There were blackberries, wild and sour and uncut, growing across the street in the yard of my blind neighbor, and I would eat them at the end of my walk, making my face the same color as the sky.

Wherever I have lived, the years in New York City or summers in Maine or Vienna, the sunset walk has been the anchor of the day, and it still makes me feel powerful. I may no longer believe I’m changed by walking, but I remember all the things that remain the same, no matter how old I get: how much shorter I am than most trees, how many colors there are, more than I can imagine, more than I’ll ever forget.

Alcott is the author of, most recently, Infinite Home. Her next novel, America Was Hard to Find, will be published in 2019.

7

BEAT THE CLOCK. Pick a route you’d like to follow for a few weeks and time how long it takes for you to complete it. Then see if you can finish the next walk just a little bit faster. Bend your arms and take shorter, quicker steps to speed up. Seeing your progress over time can be inspiring.

W A L K I N G T O S U R V I V E

By Karen Auvinen

I WA S B U I LT F O R endurance: My constitution runs solid instead of athletic. This makes me a hardy hiker. Ever since I moved to the mountains along Colorado’s Front Range nearly 25 years ago, I’ve roamed the hills, at first because my waytoo-fast husky, Elvis, needed to run ofleash, and later because I needed to feel the earth beneath my feet. Hiking grounds me in the present—in the ocean-wave sound of wind rushing through pines and the changing patterns of light scattered across a meadow. And although I absorb it all, there’s always a moment on steep terrain when my brain kicks in, demanding, “How much farther?” I’ve learned, over the years, to stubbornly focus on the little details—the soft clump of my hiking boots and the loamy scent of mountain air—to ignore my chattering brain and keep walking.

In this way, hiking prepared me to face my biggest challenge: losing everything. Two months before I turned 40, a woodstove fire incinerated my remote cabin. In a matter of hours, my entire life—not only possessions but also decades of writing—was reduced to two feet of ash and tiny bits of charred paper that blew

like snow across the mountain. I was too stunned to grieve. My immediate thought was “Why bother?” Quitting seemed far more logical than starting from scratch. I had no idea how I would begin again.

Luckily, my body knew.

Its instinct, forged on so many trails, was to ignore my faltering thoughts. I began to organize each day around the most immediate tasks: buy underwear and a toothbrush, get supplies for my dog, borrow a laptop for teaching. I moved forward, relying on the same grit I’d once used to safely navigate a violent thunderstorm in a burned part of Yellowstone that brought hail, high winds, and trees that fell like matchsticks all around the 8½-mile loop I was on.

And I hiked. It was early spring and there was still snow on all my favorite mountain trails, so I took Elvis along the dirt road that meandered near our new cabin. After almost six weeks of repeatedly walking the same loop, I discovered a clump of pasqueflowers—the first wildflowers of the season—stubbornly opening their purple cups to the sun along an icy bank. I began to cry: If they could do it, so could I.

Auvinen is the author of the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living.

8

WALK AND DINE. Instead of parking yourself at a table from appetizer through dessert, break up an evening out with walks between courses. That’s what Olinda Reynaud, 48, of Moseley, Virginia, did with a friend recently. “We had wine and mussels at the first restaurant, and then we strolled to another place for our main course. We finished with coffee a few blocks away,” she says. TAKE IN THE GOOD. Rather than barrel through a walk to get it done, stop and enjoy the beauty around you. Darcy Kitching, 45, a program coordinator for Walk2Connect in Boulder, Colorado, makes a brief mindfulness practice part of her groups’ routines: “We might stop to gaze at a mural, sniff daffodils, or delight in watching a dog play. We let go of everything else in our heads and fill ourselves with delightful presence and joy.”

9

10

SLOW DOWN. If you’ve been trying to walk faster but aren’t enjoying the challenge, you have permission to back off and go at a gentler speed. Walking is good for your body and mind even if you aren’t breaking a major sweat—so pick a pace that feels good to you. The important thing is that you enjoy walking enough to make it a regular habit.