{"id":3424,"date":"2024-12-14T06:05:46","date_gmt":"2024-12-14T13:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/?p=3424"},"modified":"2024-12-14T06:05:46","modified_gmt":"2024-12-14T13:05:46","slug":"discover-your-best-pace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/?p=3424","title":{"rendered":"Discover Your Best Pace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cOne of the agreeable surprises of becoming a walker is that you can walk faster and farther than you think, and with complete comfort,\u201d wrote Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode (<em>The Magic of Walking<\/em>, 1980).<\/p>\n<p>According to the authors, most people do not know how fast they walk. Evidently, until one becomes a walker he or she gives little attention to pace (defined as the length of your stride and the quickness of each step). Remarkably, \u201ca different speed, usually a faster one, can add to the pleasure and diminish the fatigue of walking.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>How can a faster pace cause you to get less tired? Sussman and Goode offer a long, technical explanation that has to do with the way your muscles operate and the physics of movement itself (think gravity and inertia). \u201cA longer stride, at a faster pace, takes over part of the weight-moving job. It makes less work for the muscles and puts less weight on the feet.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Annabel Street says that this faster pace (she calls it \u201cgait\u201d) means we can walk for longer periods of time,\u201d and \u201cwhen we can walk effortlessly for hour upon hour, our opportunities for walking expand. We can walk longer distances\u201d (more about this in tomorrow\u2019s blog).<\/p>\n<p>For now, Sussman says increasing your pace is easy. Just lengthen your stride while continuing the same quickness of steps. Do this until the new pace \u201cbegins to feel rhythmical and easy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I guess I have walked regularly for nearly 50 years, and I was pretty sure I already knew my pace, but a few months ago I experimented anyway\u2014first lengthening my stride, then varying the speed until I came up with a pace that felt natural.<\/p>\n<p>Voila! I walked faster and with greater ease.<\/p>\n<p>*In tomorrow\u2019s blog I\u2019ll tell how humans once won a long-distance race with horses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cOne of the agreeable surprises of becoming a walker is that you can walk faster and farther than you think, and with complete comfort,\u201d wrote Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode (The Magic of Walking, 1980). According to the authors, most people do not know how fast they walk. Evidently, until one becomes a walker he [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3425,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3424\/revisions\/3425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}