Discover Your Best Pace

“One of the agreeable surprises of becoming a walker is that you can walk faster and farther than you think, and with complete comfort,” 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 or she gives little attention to pace (defined as the length of your stride and the quickness of each step). Remarkably, “a different speed, usually a faster one, can add to the pleasure and diminish the fatigue of walking.”

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). “A 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.”

Annabel Street says that this faster pace (she calls it “gait”) means we can walk for longer periods of time,” and “when we can walk effortlessly for hour upon hour, our opportunities for walking expand. We can walk longer distances” (more about this in tomorrow’s blog).

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 “begins to feel rhythmical and easy.”

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—first lengthening my stride, then varying the speed until I came up with a pace that felt natural.

Voila! I walked faster and with greater ease.

*In tomorrow’s blog I’ll tell how humans once won a long-distance race with horses.