Walking is widely recognized as one of the best activities you can do for your physical and mental health. It’s so simple, yet getting those 10,000 steps in every day can make a huge difference to one's overall well-being.
Obviously, walking is in no way modern, yet our appreciation of this essential activity is relatively recent. As a pastime and form of exercise, walking surely owes some of its popularity to the “pedestrianism” craze that emerged in the United States in the 1860s and enjoyed two decades in the national spotlight.
Although long-distance walking had already gained traction in Britain thanks to early athletes like Foster Powell, who walked from London to York and back in 1773, America’s first professional walker rose to fame during one of the most turbulent periods of U.S. history. In 1860, a young Bostonian named Edward Payson Weston bet a friend that Abraham Lincoln would lose the presidential election. He was so sure that the Republican candidate would be defeated that he promised to walk from Boston to Washington, D.C., in less than 10 days, arriving in time for Lincoln’s inauguration.
When Lincoln won the election, Weston set out to fulfill his promise, quickly realizing that his long-distance walk could make him an unlikely celebrity. The press publicized Weston’s trek, with people all over the country following his progress. Although Weston arrived a few hours late, President Lincoln, who had been among those tracking his progress, offered to cover the cost of his journey back to Boston, and he was invited to attend Lincoln's inaugural ball.
After the U.S. Civil War, Weston and other “pedestrians” recognized the financial incentives of selling tickets and encouraging betting on timed long-distance walking. The pursuit attracted both Northern and Southern spectators and was seen as a unifying force in the aftermath of the conflict. The competitions, considered the forerunners of today’s ultramarathons, ranged from walks lasting an entire day to multiple days, while some featured a specified distance to complete, such as 100 or even 1,000 miles. As some of the first non-royal or non-political celebrities, pedestrians capitalized on their newfound fame, promoting products and even selling advertising space on their walking clothes.
In conjunction with the popularity of professional walkers, ordinary men and women were urged to take up walking as a leisure activity by publications like The New York Times, which encouraged readers to walk around Staten Island equipped with sturdy footwear and sustenance in the form of sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs.
The pedestrianism craze ended in the 1880s, coinciding with the growing popularity of bicycle racing. By then, the sport’s reputation had been tarnished by scandals including race fixing, exploitation, extortion, and even steroid use. However, pedestrianism lives on in the form of modern racewalking, which is differentiated from running by the “fair heel and toe rule” and, with the exception of 1924, has been an official sport in the Summer Olympics since 1908.
Go take a walk:
- Pedestrianism attracted competitors from varied backgrounds, including Irish immigrant Daniel O’Leary and Haitian immigrant Frank Hart, who both won numerous walking competitions.
- The English “pedestriennes” Emma Sharp and Ada Anderson demonstrated that women could also compete in similarly grueling competitions. Sharp completed a 1,000-mile walk in 1,000 hours, while Anderson was dubbed the “Champion Lady Walker of the Walker” after walking 1,500 miles in 1,000 hours.
- Edwards Payson Weston continued walking professionally into his 70s, including a 4,000-mile, 100-day walk from New York to San Francisco at age 70 and a 1,546-mile, 51-day walk from New York to Minneapolis at age 74. In a tragic twist of fate, Weston, who had long railed against cars as making people lazy, was struck by an NYC taxicab in 1927, at age 88, and never walked again.
