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I Will Never Be Out of Pain, but Walking Helps
When I walk, my body loosens and my posture improves
When I was in my mid-twenties, I developed back problems. They’d started in my early teens, but after years of managing with yoga (and massage when I could afford it), I found that regular strategies for keeping the pain at bay were suddenly ineffective.
These days, I am in pain all the time — from where my skull cradles my spine all the way down to my heels. I usually can’t move my head much to the right. Many mornings I wake up and spend several stiff minutes convincing my ankles, knees, hips, and lower back to bend and shift, at least enough for me to walk to the kitchen and make coffee.
A couple of years ago I published a nonfiction book about walking. While writing it, I became so enamored with the evolution of bipedal walking across hominin species, with the loss of walking in our car-centric world, and with the role of walkability in our communities and walking in our social connections that I forgot it was the pain that first drew me to walking as a way of life.
I was twenty-eight when the pain became bad enough to affect both my walking ability and my sleep. At that point, my husband and I had lived for a year and a half in a far-flung exurban house with a wild field for a yard and choruses of…
