It's not true, as a Missing Person used to shriek back in l982, that nobody walks in L.A. In 2013, lots of people walk in L.A. For fun and exercise. Heck, Los Angeles could be "a walker's paradise!"
Well, hasn't happened yet, but it actually could, and walking itself has become cool. In the nick of time. It began not with a promotion, not with a celebrity, not with Michael Moore, but with the realization that "sitting is the new smoking." In a TED talk, allegedly.
From a story in today's NYTimes:
This always sounds absurd to New Yorkers, but many Angelenos would sooner have their mug shots appear on TMZ than go a few steps without a motor vehicle. Here, we drive ourselves to jog, to bike, to attend spin class and to hike, and it’s not unusual for a dinner gathering of three couples to involve five or six cars. All of which contributes to how much we sit. When we are not sitting on the freeways, we are sitting at our computers, in meetings, at restaurants or in front of the TV. And by we, in this case I mean me, at least until recently.
At this year’s TED conference, the author and the Silicon Valley corporate executive Nilofer Merchant delivered a three-minute talk that scared the life out of me about how sitting has become the smoking of our generation. It arrived on the heels of a Harvard Business Review article she wrote that said Americans average 9.3 hours of sitting a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping. So elemental is sitting to our daily routine, we don’t even think about it, and yet it’s killing us.
Just one hour of sitting slows production of fat-burning enzymes by as much as 90 percent, she said, and a longer term habit (you might want to sit down for this) negatively affects good cholesterol levels and increases the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain kinds of cancer.
[snip]
Ms. Merchant’s prescription is to just keep moving. Walk with friends instead of stuffing your faces at meals. Walk to any destination within a mile radius of your home or business. Consider a standing desk (Ikea sells components to hack one for under $150) or even a treadmill desk, a kind of turbo work station that allows you to waste time on Facebook, but at an invigorating 2 m.p.h.
Naturally, Hollywood is all over it. “The actor Jerry O’Connell was in here the other day and said, ‘You’re the fittest screenwriter I’ve ever seen,’ “ said Janet Tamaro, who created “Rizzoli & Isles” and sometimes spends 10 straight hours walking through rewrites (many days her pedometer registers 50,000 steps). “I said, ‘Well, thanks, but that bar is pretty low.’ “
From a great NYTimes story by free-lance hero David Hochman. The city really does have great stairs in some hilly neighborhoods, known only to locals, leafy and quiet and quick. Charming.
Kit Stolz 