Wild as It Gets by Don Pinnock

Author:Don Pinnock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: popular nature, African wildlife, biology, human existence, man’s place in nature, cosmology, man’s place in the universe, conservation in Africa, environment, natural science, Gaia, meaning of life, travel in Africa, African travel writing, man and animals, nonfiction ebook, South African ebook, South African authors
Publisher: Tafelberg
Published: 2016-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

The art of walking

The word saunter isn’t used much these days, probably because so few of us do it. Instead we march. The dictionary links sauntering to words like amble, meander, drift, mosey and, my favourite, tootle. It is probably derived from the French sans terre, meaning ‘without land’ or simply ‘drifter’.

The great American wanderer Henry David Thoreau, who cut loose from civilisation to live in the woods beside Walden Pond, had little time for those who didn’t do it:

‘He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the saunterer is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.’

Sauntering implies a way of walking (just tootling along) but also an awareness of actually walking. And that awareness was evidently once vitally important to us as a species: our feet have more nerve endings per square centimetre than anywhere else on our body.

‘Your feet are designed to feed multiple information to your brain,’ said podiatrist Chris Delpierre when I tracked him down at the Sports Science Institute in Cape Town. ‘They check the surface you’re walking on, the temperature, gradient, grip and balance. So obviously the best way to walk is barefoot or with a minimalist shoe. If you lock up your foot in a boot you blindfold it.

‘We’ve lost the art of barefoot walking. Our ancestors had hard feet and could run on them all day. But our feet have evolved. They have much softer skin. And because of shoes we walk differently.’

Together with biokineticist Avi Prasad, Chris explained why by slipping off his shoes and waggling his toes. ‘Your foot is designed to bend and when this happens it does two very different things milliseconds apart. On contact with the ground your heel acts like a turd from a tall cow and blobs. As soon as you roll forwards the tendons go soft allowing the bones to spread and your foot to widen.

‘A fraction of a second later it has to become rigid and it does this when your big toe hits the ground. This tightens your foot bones which become a lever for forward motion.

‘So if your foot doesn’t bend, it remains a soft, squidgy thing which loses its power as a precision device for walking on. That’s what happens in a rigid boot.’

The motion of walking is the biokineticist’s department: ‘As your foot bends,’ Avi explained, ‘the load chain goes through your ankle, up your leg into your knee and hip, which all start to take more weight. If you don’t have that signal from your big toe, your load transfer is going to go somewhere else. This will change your movement dynamics – and that’s when injuries can happen.’

Marguerite Osler, an Alexander Technique teacher, became so concerned about people stomping and shuffling around that she wrote a book to help them walk. The Art of Walking is more poetry than prose and more Zen than science, but is a lyrical plea to take off our shoes and live.

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