If Aesop were instructing his students in moral precepts today, instead of using the tortoise and the hare to teach that the race does not always go to the swift, he might have created the fable of the jogger and the walker.
The moral would be the same. But unlike the ancient tale where the rabbit loses the race by napping while the slow but sure reptile makes its way to the finish line, in the modern version the jogger would be sidelined by chondromalacia (runner's knee), periostitis (shin splints), sciatica (shooting pains in the hip and lower back), or any one of a hundred other stress ailments that befall runners.
The winner in the modern tale would be the slow but sure, injury-free walker. And rightly so.
The running and fitness boom has evolved into a walking explosion. City streets are no longer clogged with grim-faced, sweaty joggers. Walkers, once the butt of jokes, are sashaying out of hiding, turning the daily constitutional into the fitness activity of choice.
Walking is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other, yet so complex it is a miracle. Ask any new parent after watching baby's first step, or the men who walked on the moon.
Almost everybody does it, but this most commonplace of activities has suddenly been elevated to the status of a national trend. Our chief form of locomotion is now chic sport.
The numbers speak for themselves. A survey conducted by the National Sporting Goods Association estimates that 53.5 million Americans are engaged in a fitness walking program, up from 41.5 in 1986. Add recreational walkers and the 1987 figures soar to more than 100 million.
Next to swimming, exercise walking is the second most popular participatory sport in America, according to the Sporting Goods Association. In fact, more people walk for fun and health than ride bicycles, go fishing, jog, or play tennis or golf.
Prevention magazine reports that 69 percent of all adults walk for exercise. Thirty-one percent walk a mile or more on a daily basis. And a greater percent of Hispanics walk for exercise than either whites or blacks.
While the sale of running shoes continues to decline, the sale of walking shoes has climbed steadily over the past three years. In 1986, people spent $368 million on more than eleven million pairs of shoes specifically designed for walking. Last year that figure was up by 7 percent.
New York City even has a store, the Urban Hiker at West 85th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, that caters exclusively to the perigrinations of perambulators.
A walker burns the same number of calories as a runner for each mile he covers, about 100 per mile, but walkers report far fewer injuries than runners. A study conducted at Harvard University showed that a brisk daily two-mile walk can cut a person's risk of heart disease by 28
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