We are in the second half of the 1970s. I left Laval — a bit late — by bike to spend a few days at the family chalet in Saint-Tite. The night surprises me in the end of Saint-Barnabé. I had planned for it by tying a sleeping bag on my luggage rack. So I push my bike to the bottom of one of the cornfields that are the main ornament of this corner of the country, I unroll my sleeping and lie down under the stars on the ground of the “platinum”, as the poet said.
I wake up drenched as soup in a morning flooded with diamond dew, then hit the road again. And it is there, a little further, near Saint-Boniface, that I had my appearance.
A man was coming towards me on foot. With a long, elegant stride, he walked along the shoulder of this country lane. The morning light gave him a solar halo, and in my memory, he has wings and I hear the music of Chariots of Fire. The cap, the mustache, the sportswear, I recognized him immediately: it was Marcel Jobin, “the crazy man in pajamas”, Canadian race walking champion, bathed that morning not in the dew of a cornfield, but in his fair share of Olympic glory after the Montreal Games.
But Jobin is not only the Quebec pioneer of a sport, he is also, beyond his accomplishments on the field, the avant-garde defender of a concept still unknown in the first decades of his enduring career: the sharing the road.
“I walked more than 100 kilometers a week, and one in two motorists made it clear to me that I was crazy and that my place was not on the street,” he confided in an interview with RDS in 2018, when, at 76, he continued to train seriously and participate in international competitions.
Moreover, the most common prejudice against walking considered as a sporting exercise is that it is a “cushy” sport. This prejudice, I myself maintained it until a tendinitis forced me to give up, at least for a time, my modest outings of jogging in the streets of the district. Until then, I had been that endangered animal of the North American fauna: an urban walker. Someone who does his shopping on foot when possible, who uses the sidewalks when they exist, who walks in the woods like the snorkeler goes up to breathe, and who hardly jumps any more at the sound of vehicles whistling at his ears.
But starting to look at walking as a sport changed everything. One thing never ceased to amaze me: why were 95% of the walkers I encountered during my daily pedestrian escape going so slowly? I know they’re mostly retired, their fitness walk is just another prescription from the doctor, and the turtle in the fable wins the race in the end. But precisely, as long as you claim to keep in shape, why not shake up your cardio a bit and try to hybridize the hare and the turtle?
The meditative pace is great for forest walks, but when city blocks and street corners are the backdrop for my outings, I need a little action. I lengthen my stride, quicken my pace. After a while, the little tingling at the level of the scalp tells me that my system has engaged a high gear. Nothing to do with the endorphins of running, but I am now at an hour a day and the more I walk, the more the advantages of this discipline appear obvious to me. I distinguish at least four of them.
Physics: if doctors do nothing to discourage the current vogue for jogging, I know some who freak out at the thought of all these tendinopathies and all these kneecaps to be replaced in a few years; on the other hand, everyone agrees on the benefits of brisk walking.
Mental: preventing depression is great, but the effects of walking on brain activity don’t stop there. How many intrigues of novels tied or untied while rushing with great strides under the tolerant eye of the neighbors? In his prime, Stephen King walked for an hour and a half every morning before coming home to spit out his 2,500 words. This admirable pedestrian asceticism was interrupted the day when a crazy van worthy of a twisted story coming from his own brain sent him flying into the ditch. I don’t remember having had a single important idea while jogging.
Social: going on foot means getting around the world. The neighbors are no longer anonymous people locked in their tin box at a red light, but real people to whom we can make conversation. Interesting.
Politics: This is perhaps the most important. Even though the IPCC warns us that we have three years left to completely change our way of life, walking makes us look at cars with a different eye. Having to defend one’s edge of the road against those I call the motorists in a neighborhood where sidewalks are considered a luxury beyond our means is a transformative experience. My personal objective is to succeed in convincing one out of two motorists that their place is not in the street.
The latest news, Marcel Jobin, 80 spring this year, was still walking…