How Walking Rewires Your Brain & Body: Endurance, Habits, Pain Tolerance & Longevity

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“Welcome to 2% I'm your host, Michael Easter,”

and I am thrilled to announce that this is the very first episode

of my new podcast. Now, if you have not heard of me, you may have seen me on other podcasts like the Joe Rogan experience like Andrew Huberman or maybe on TV, like CBS Saturday morning or Good Morning America either way. Here's my background. I am a journalist who has been investigating human health and well-being for about 20 years now. I was an editor at Men's Health for a long time.

Worked at other magazines like Scientific American, like GQ, then I became a professor for seven years. And in that process, I started writing books. So I ended up writing a book called The Comfor crisis and scarcity brand. They became best sellers. They changed a lot of people and their habits. My work is taking me to places like conflict zones to the Bolivian jungle,

to labs at Harvard, to neuroscience labs all over the map. And all these experiences have taught me one thing.

And that's that improving your life. It isn't always easy.

It typically comes through embracing discomfort, taking on challenges big and small across the days, weeks, months, and years of your life, and leaning into what is hard. That is how people learn doing hard things. We are going to have long in-depth, fascinating conversations with some of the world's greatest thinkers in all different areas.

Each person will teach us something about what it means to live a good life right now, and it will all be actionable. And you might be wondering, why is this called two percent? Two. That is the percent of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available, only two percent. Now I would argue, every single one of those people knew that taking the stairs would be better for them.

Be better for their physical health. It would be better for their mental health. Yet the vast majority of people, they choose to do the easy, more effortless thing that not only is not going to help them in the long run, but that might actually harm them in the long run. So we're going to look at how do we find challenges big and small can be as simple as the staircase that can improve our lives in the long run?

And how do we actually build the sort of online mental networks to make

“taking the harder path and easier decision to make?”

Now what is our first episode? That is a very important one. How you can open this thing? Today's episode focuses on one of the most fundamental things that a human being can do and a thing that we no longer do quite as much and it is absolutely hurting our well-being. We're going to be talking about walking. So first in context here, walking absolutely shaped humans into who we are and allowed us to take over the world.

It is our most fundamental act. We used to walk about 20,000 steps a day. And the average person today only takes about 4,000 steps. Now I've been thinking about this because a year ago today, I was in the middle of the Utah desert on an 850 mile hike across southern Utah.

So what we'd have to do is we'd have to navigate through the desert, find our way. This is considered the hardest route in the world. We'd have to navigate down canyons. We would have to find water in the scorching hot landscape. And I learned so much about myself and what the human body is capable of through that hike.

We were hiking like 25 miles a day. It was one of the greatest adventures I've ever been on in my life. And so with this anniversary of the hike, thinking about walking.

“I wanted to know, what is the human body really capable of when it comes to walking?”

Because I surely hadn't been walking 25 miles a day before I did this hike, but then I put myself in that situation. And all of a sudden, I was able to go severely along distances every single day in a harsh landscape. So to answer that question, we are bringing in an evolutionary geneticist named Melissa Alardo.

She studies some of the world's most amazing populations on earth and really understands what we are all capable of no matter who you are.

The fact that it's like a big achievement to get 10,000 steps in a day, you know, like that's something we're rewarding ourselves for when from most of human history. That was probably very standard, if not kind of below average. After that, we're going to bring on one of my dearest friends who isn't a big walker, not a real athletic guy. But one day left his house in New York and he started walking and he didn't stop for a really, really long time. So we're going to learn what he learned in that journey and what it can tell us about taking on challenges that are often unexpected.

I wish I could come across those moments every day. I wish I could break my routines with the moxie of wanting to change it up and the impetus to just try something and then go with it.

“And then finally, at the very end, we're going to cover what the science really says about how many steps you should take a day.”

I know exactly how much you should be walking even if you don't want to take on an epic walk like I did and I will give you a hint. No, it is not 10,000. So let's get into it. Okay, so story time, I was just on a 14 hour flight back from Europe. Now, I spent about 10 hours of that flight, writing, researching, reading, nerdy studies, but then eventually my brain had just had enough. So I turned on a movie. I turned on a movie called The Long Walk. Now, it is based on a Steven King novel and in full Steven King fashion, it has got the most insane murderous plot line of all time.

Here's what happens in the movies, bunch of boys, they're rounded up in this post-apocalyptic world and then they are asked to walk as far as they possibly can without stopping.

So I'm going to play a little preview of how this plays out and what the rules for this are. I'm not going to go through the whole rule book, but it boils down to this. If you follow below the speed of three miles per hour, you get your ticket. Walk until there's only one of you left. Now, when I first turned on this movie and heard the rules, I thought you took a bunch of untrained teenagers.

These people have not been preparing for this walk physically. I don't know, I bet they'll get 20, 30, 40 miles. No, literally all of the boys make it at least a hundred miles. And the one who wins, another spoiler alert, makes it more than 300 miles.

So I wanted to know, is this actually possible? These kids have no training. They also only have resources from a canteen and a couple sandwiches.

“Could a human being actually walk that far without stopping?”

So to answer this question, we have Melissa Alardo who literally studies extreme physical acts and she has unbelievable answers to all the questions I had about this insane movie. Thanks for being here. You have done a lot of endurance stuff. If you've done ultra runs, I know you do crazy backcountry ski touring. I do long backcountry ski tours. I didn't iron man.

I actually was training for a 50 mile ultra and had some knee problems. So I haven't done an ultra yet, but I'm around runners and I, yeah, I love endurance sports. So a lot of the boys end up going past the hundred miles. The one who wins, I think goes more than 350 miles. Big question is how realistic do you think this is?

Because the key, of course, is that you cannot drop below three miles an hour. If you stop, you basically get shot.

“Do you think it's physically possible for a person to walk nonstop three miles an hour for that long?”

I do think it's possible. I think, you know, obviously it's extraordinary circumstances in the movie. So, I mean, there are a lot of people obviously people who mostly train, who do ultra marathon.

What's incredible about the human body is that if you keep the effort low enough, you know,

we're really well adapted in general to endurance. So, yeah, with some training, a really steady pace. Obviously there are certain things that they're having to take care of while they're walking that seem a little bit challenging, but yeah, I think it's possible. So why are we so well adapted to endurance?

There are some theories about this. Some of it is centers around the fact that we may have traditionally practiced a form of hunting, where our endurance became an advantage. And there are groups of people around the world, some of whom I work with, who continue to practice this kind of hunting.

It's called persistence hunting. We're essentially, you know, we're good at endurance. We evolve this endurance feet because when we pursue animals for long enough, if we can last longer than they do, they become very easy to hunt. So, some people think that that is the reason that we're so good at long distance endurance kind of effort.

And part of that is because we are really efficient at cooling ourselves, right? And other animals are not. So if you just run them down far enough, they'll eventually overheat. And meanwhile, we're sweating. We're not super hot.

And so we can just keep going eventually. They are dinner more or less. Yeah, exactly. And in some of these communities, well, populations will practice this at the hottest part of the day,

Okay, so what do you think the biggest hurdles that these boys would have faced would be?

Well, there's a number of things.

“You know, it's interesting as they were thinking about what they were eating.”

What they were eating, what they were being given to eat at that energy level, at that amount of effort. Your body is primarily burning fat. And there are actually ways that you can, you know, change your diet or you're training to push yourself to burn even more fat at that pace. So, you know, if you're consuming fat, then you're able to last a lot longer. But if you're consuming, you know, like one of the people is eating, you know, venison,

which is very low in fat, very low in carbohydrates. Your body has no fuel. And so as soon as the glycogen or muscles is depleted, you know, if you do push into that point where you're burning carbohydrates, you're in trouble. You know, when that hill gets steep and all of a sudden, their heart rates spikes, they're going to be done for. Another thing that I noticed too is because they didn't name a year in the movie,

but I'm assuming this is the way it's filmed and what people are wearing.

I'm assuming this is post World War II. And so a lot of the boys are wearing these like work boots effectively. And I saw that and I'm just thinking, oh my god, your feet would be destroyed after 15 miles, much less 150. I feel like that would be a giant limiter. Oh, absolutely, especially once it starts raining and you have humidity introduced into it.

Oh, yeah, I was not then being there footwear before we hit record. We were talking a little bit about sleep and I had gone into this thinking, I feel like at our 36, you would start to just go totally crazy. But you brought up some interesting points about how the amount of sleep people need differs. And how a person who needs a less sleep might actually be at an advantage.

So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so there's a rare familial mutation that causes people to not need as much sleep.

So it's these, they call them natural short sleepers.

And they sleep generally 46 hours a night with no ill effects. So no cognitive effects from that, no seemingly no health effects. It actually seems like maybe they live longer. And they've done some studies kind of replicating this this genetic advantage in mice. And the mice also seems to be very healthy.

So yeah, someone like that would certainly do much better because while they're going into a sleep debt, it certainly not as much of a debt. And yeah, that was the one thing I was a little surprised was they didn't show anyone hallucinating because surely after that long, I would imagine you'd be hallucinating pretty hard. Yeah, absolutely a question about those people who need less sleep.

How do we know who they are? If there's a person out there who goes, oh, yeah, I usually sleep five hours a night. Everyone tells me I need eight, but I feel fine. Is there a way to know? Yeah, there's some ongoing studies too to identify exactly that, you know,

there's this one family in which they found this mutation and everybody in this family seems to do fine with four to six hours of sleep. And so they know what gene it's acting on. And it seems like different people may carry different mutations in that gene. And there may be other genes also that influence how much sleep we need,

because you know anecdotally, some people seem to be fine on seven eight hours, some people need nine ten. But yeah, I wish I were one of these lucky people who only needed four to six, because that's a lot more hours of the day that you have. Totally.

One thing I thought was interesting too is, I don't think any of these people competing had actually trained for this. I mean, there's kind of this random sampling of there's a boy from every state.

“How would the fact that they haven't trained at all factor into this?”

And I will note that the boy who won, he has this line where he says something like, Oh, I've been walking all my life like this is my life. And he's the one who wins. So how do you think that would affect things? Oh, yeah, I think like, you know,

lifetime of training in whatever that looks like would absolutely give you an advantage. So, you know, I mean, I know he was saying it kind of more metaphorically, but there are communities like some of the communities that I work with. They live in really remote areas. You know, to get around.

They're very mobile groups of people. They're just walking all the time. They're walking that steep hills. They're walking, you know, many, many miles every day through canyons. And so that's a form of training in itself.

“But yeah, otherwise, I think, you know, straight off the couch trying to walk 250 miles would be pretty challenging.”

Your body is just not ready to kind of switch into that endurance mode as quickly if you're not training ever. Well, I think it's interesting going back to what we were talking about how humans are adapted to endurance. Probably for most of time, if you took a random sampling of people, they would have been walking, I don't know, 10, 15 miles a day carrying stuff in normal life.

They would be much more ready to do something like to be thrown into this.

Yeah, the fact that it's like a big achievement to get 10,000 steps in a day. You know, like that's something we're rewarding ourselves for when, for most of human history that was probably very standard if not kind of below average.

“Yeah, I think tells you something about the current walking fitness of our population.”

Totally. There's a researcher who is now at USC named David Raiklin.

And he studied basically physical activity among the odds.

And I think the number he put on it as far as average steps a day was something like 20,000 steps a day on average. Yeah, I believe it. So before we hit record, you made a really interesting point. And you said that women would likely perform better in this context and the context than men. So why is that?

There's this really interesting thing with the length of races with running and some other activities that we've seen, where the longer the race is, the more the gap between men and women closes.

To the point where when it's long enough, women actually often do better.

“And so, you know, when I think in a 5k, it's like men on average perform 10% better than women.”

By the time you're getting 200 miles that gap has narrowed by the time you're getting to multi day races through deserts, women consistently perform better. Interestingly, women also perform better in long distance swims open water swims, like very long distances. So there's, you know, a temperature regulation component to that somehow women seem to be better, regulating temperature during these activities.

But some of the theories as to why women do better in these long distances have to do with how women's bodies oxidize fat. So how we, you know, essentially use fat in which just like I said, the primary fuel when you're walking at that kind of activity level. But then also, you know, women have the capability to be pregnant. And pregnancy is metabolically the single hardest thing a human can do. So it's someone calculated it's essentially the same as running a marathon every day for the entirety of your pregnancy metabolically.

“So it's, you know, maybe that's what's driving women in these very long efforts to perform better.”

But yeah, it would have been interesting to see what happens if we throw a few women in there. I came across a study where it measured effort in high intensity interval classes. And it found that women when the coach would say, go your hardest, women would consistently go harder than men. Like there was almost, they were just more willing to push into the sort of darkness of exercise induced suffering than the men were, which I thought was fascinating. Yeah, and that means like the lines up with some things that I've seen about women having in an exercise setting higher pain tolerance than men.

So in some settings, it seems like men have higher pain tolerance than women, but in others, it seems that women very much have higher pain tolerance. And maybe that's how they're able to kind of hang out in that pain cave a little bit longer than men. Totally. It's like when I get a blister on a walk, it's the end of the world and my wife just, you know, her sock is bloody and she just hasn't even mentioned it. It's exactly that man flew as real. Absolutely, and so the competitor who ended up winning this thing, what I thought was interesting is that he had a really sort of positive outlook the entire time.

He was trying to keep everyone going. He was always, you know, happy and smiling. How do you think mindset would factor into a competition like this?

Yeah, mindset would be huge. You know, I imagine that it says a lot of times I think about things in terms of genetics and genetic pre-disposition, but at the end of the day, there have actually been studies that show that. What you are told about your genes influences your ability more than your genes. So there was a study where they told people that they were pre-disposed to be low exercise or have low exercise capacity or something like that. And within a very short time, the way people exercise lived up to that expectation, despite the fact that their genetics didn't actually line up with that.

So it seems like, you know, the other side of that, of course, is that if you believe that you have a really high capacity, if you believe you can win, then you're probably a lot more likely to win. And it's really interesting because it's really at the physiological, like even the molecular level, or bodies respond to what our brains are saying. That's fascinating. Is this, does this sort of line up with the central governor theory at all, which is basically saying that your body sort of puts your brain puts a limit.

The brain puts a limit on your physical output in order to sort of protect yourself. So you don't end up going so hard that you injure yourself and burn out a fuel. Is it in that lane or is that something totally different? Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that seems like it lines up really well because, yeah, normally it's protective to not push yourself to the brain. But, you know, if you can switch that off, I mean, it's kind of like, so I work a lot with divers who hold their breath and free diving.

You know, our brains tell us we need to breathe, not when we actually need to breathe, but when carbon dioxide has built up, and that's also protective because our body's saying like, oh, you know, time to breathe.

So it becomes much more dangerous at that point, and that's why sometimes people drown, but it does enable them to hold their breath for an extraordinary amount of time.

“So a lot of it is kind of like a smoke detector, whereas if the smoke detector is going off, it's sensitive, right?”

We want the smoke detector to go off when you burn a piece of toast, when you're cooking something in it ignites. Most times there's not an actual fire, I.e. danger, but we want the smoke detector sensitive, so the time that there is an actual fire, you're going to react and make sure there's nothing wrong. Is that kind of what we're talking about here? Yeah, and you know, a piece of that is that we were also talking about before is that when you're driving yourself that hard, your body has to ignore other parts of its physiology to put the effort into the endurance, so things like your immune system are compromised.

So a lot of people after long endurance events like Autros will get sick because their immune system just doesn't have, you know, your body doesn't have the energy to devote all of the resources to everything that needs those resources.

So we see a character, a competitor who becomes sick over the course of the race and says, you know, I haven't been sick in 10 years, and it's like, well, yeah, that's not a coincidence.

You know, you're putting your body through the ringer, it's putting all of its resources into walking, and that has nothing left for the immune system. I did a long hike through Southern Utah, it was like 850 miles, and when I got back, I got sick within like a week. It was just like immediately your home, okay, you're safe. Now we're going to shut you down and get sick. Yeah, exactly.

“In terms of what we were talking about with mindset, have you experienced that when you do some of your endurance stuff, like, especially in the mountains in Utah?”

Yeah, and you know, I mean, it helps that I just love skiing so much, so it's still hot, you know, I'm in it for that, and that makes it easier to kind of push through, but I mean, I'm, you know, in my office, and it's so few degrees cooler than it normally is, and I'm freezing, but I'm out there and I'm able to push through very cold temperatures. So it's like, yeah, we're, we're very able to change our base lines, as I know you talk about, so it's a, I have experience that, and it's amazing what you can do if you decide to push through something.

Do you feel like that there's almost a lesson there for the average person where if you don't like to exercise and you find it too hard simply changing the environment and finding something that you actually do love can almost act as fuel to kind of get you past the hump.

Oh, absolutely, I mean, if you're not excited to get out there, then, you know, if you're tired, you're, you're just not going to do it.

Whereas, you know, I could be tired, but right now it's snowing up in the mountains, and I'm really excited to go ski tomorrow, because it's so much fun, and so I think. Yeah, whatever it is that you can find that joy. Some days, if I'm feeling really tired after work, I go to spin class, which feels a little silly sometimes because it's kind of like a, you know, like a dance party on a bike, but it's really fun. And so there are days where that's my inspiration. So I think you have finding joy in whatever you do for exercise, just makes it so much easier.

Totally. I've experienced that myself in terms of if I'm on a treadmill. It's like it's so long. It's so boring. The minutes go by so slow, but if I go to a trail run, I'll look down and I've gone six miles. I'm like, oh, I feel great. This is, I'm having a great time. If I was doing six miles on a treadmill in mile two, I'd be like, we need to, we need to stop this. This is awful. Yeah, absolutely. I was on the stairs in the gym the other day, and I was like, 20 minutes in, I was like, oh, no. I can't do this.

What do you think in real life, most closely mimics this competition, of course, without the possibility of being shot at any given moment if you slow down? As far as I know, there actually are races quite similar to this where it's not so much where they're making you maintain a specific speed, but it's, you know, last man's, I think they're even called last man standing or something like that. And you essentially have to go at certain distance every hour or whatever it is. And if you cover that, if you're able to finish that distance in that time period, you are still in the race.

Yeah. Um, so, and I think people last quite a while in those, I mean, of course, you have a lot of, you know, races where there's 200 plus miles that you're covering.

“But it is interesting, and they mentioned this in the film too, the psychology of not having a finish line is so different because it's not that you have to make it somewhere.”

It's that you have to outlast everyone else. So yeah, I can't imagine what it would be like to compete in something like that. Absolutely. Um, what do you think the sort of big practical takeaways from this movie are for the average person as it relates to endurance physiology mindset?

I recently was actually in the Canadian in the mountains and Canada backcountry skiing for a week with a woman with 71 years old.

And she we were doing, you know, 52 hundred feet of her a day and she was doing that seven days in a row. And it was just so amazing to me, you know, I mean, she was keeping a good pace. It was a study, you know, wasn't a particularly fast pace, but 52 hundred feet a day for seven days is really impressive at 71.

“And so I think it's kind of important to to keep in mind that, you know, if you if you if you train, if you keep out of good pace.”

Um, you're capable of a lot more than I think people think they are. Well, thanks for coming on Melissa. We really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. Now, if you want to deeper dive into the science of endurance, especially as applies to mindset, you can go to www.pct.com and search exercise fatigue isn't emotion that goes down the rabbit hole.

“And it gives you some actionable advice about how you can sort of turn off or at least less than that governor and your brain that is screaming at you to slow down and quit when you probably have a lot more in the tank.”

Something I'm going to start doing on the show is bringing in ordinary people who have done something unbelievably physically challenging and learned something from it. Some of these people might be ultra marathoners others might be everyday people who just went out and started doing something physical and kept pushing the boundaries and learned something in the process. And there's no better person to start this idea out than my good long time friend foster camera. So I first met foster when I was working in media in New York City. We were both editors at different publications. We would occasionally send each other stories to do and he's originally from Vegas. So when I moved to Vegas any time we would come in to town to meet with his family hang out half holidays.

We've always made up hang out do something foster you will learn no is not necessarily an athletic person.

You know he walks around a lot he does a few things but he's definitely not a physical specimen and yet that said one day he got some bad news in his life all that him explained that. And it prompted him to leave his house with a 25 pound weight in a backpack on his back so he was rocking and he started walking. And each time he would go to stop he would keep walking and keep walking and it ended in one of the most amazing physical acts I've ever heard of in my life. So we're going to bring him on to talk about that not to mention he did this thing twice.

And he learned so much from it in the process about the power of walking about the power of getting outside what is ordinary and things about himself that really refrained what he had gone through and the news that he received. So what that will said we're going to bring in foster. And we're going to get out of here. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me Michael. Here's where we need to start for context. I would not say that you are not athletic. I would also not say that you are a David Goggins type. I don't think you live by your whoop score. No. I do know that you occasionally at least use to enjoy a cigarette or two not for six years now, but yes or eight years eight years to actually you go see DJs that begin at the time that I go to bed.

“Well, after that well after that, you are active. I would say like I'm a lot of New Yorkers. She'll let a walking in veteran walker. Sure. Do you go to the gym?”

Sometimes I belong to a rock climbing gym, which was not the cliche that it is now a friend got me into indoor climbing bouldering about five six years ago. I'm doing less of that these days, but I do go to the gym. I did take a weightlifting class last year. I would not call myself athletic though. Spry. Spry is going to be a word. But one fine day, you do something that I would classify as very athletic. I would say I put you in David Goggins territory in the sense that you put on a weighted backpack how much was it 25 pounds and the first year I did it.

I don't think I actually had anything in it besides the way. So why did you take this walk in the first place? So that same friend who got me into indoor rock climbing was my best friend of 25 years.

Right before I turned 21. And so, you know, he eventually moved to LA. I'm just part of Margaret. They moved there. And in 2020, he's diagnosed with a squamous cell carcinoma of the parodid gland, which is, it's a cancer of the gland behind your sweat gland around there. Sorry to all the doctors who know it abroad gland is cringing at my description of it. And he has a big surgery goes through chemo and radiation. There it comes back as metastatic and in July of 2022, he passes away. And you know, there is a form of relief. I would say with it because you don't want to see this person that you love suffer for so long. And, you know, it's just it's over.

“It's fun. And you are all of a sudden looking at, you know, your life after this thing has happened. And how old was it?”

So he was 37. And I know that there are a lot of people who did not know just how sick he was. You want to keep very private about it. So I know the next day is some news is going to get out. And there are going to be some questions.

And frankly, again, I live in a two bedroom apartment. I work a lot from home. I just didn't really want to be home that day.

Yeah, sitting by yourself. Well, and, you know, was late July in New York City. So it's a middle of the summer. People are out warm, beautiful day. And I don't want to be sulking inside my apartment. But I don't want to be anywhere else either. I just don't want to be inside being inside felt too restrictive. Yeah. And so I got in the rocking backpack through you.

And I love walking around the city. I love putting in music in my headphones and walking on any day. I should add. And so I just get moving.

I just throw on the backpack and I get moving. Where did you leave from your apartment? My apartments in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. No direction to mind. No mileage. No just just I'm going to walk.

“Yeah, I'm going to walk. I think sometime I was headed towards the Williamsburg Bridge because I wanted to be. I love going by the water.”

And at a certain point, I'm going over the Williamsburg Bridge. And I think to myself, you know what? I've never done. I lived in New York for 17 years.

And I've never walked over the Manhattan Bridge. And so you don't know what I'm going to do today. I'm going to walk over the Manhattan Bridge. And if only as a small reminder to myself, that even after this terrible thing happened, that there's still new things I can do, new horizons to reach across, literally new bridges to cross. Yeah. And that there is more that is new and wonderful ahead of this. And again, I wasn't in this despondently sad place. I actually believed that I was relatively well adjusted the occasion.

I was going to therapy, I was speaking with my friends about it. But when something shitty happens, you want to derive meaning from it.

“Or just make it less shitty, somehow amuliorate that shitiness. Well, I think that that reminds me of this research on how we frame events.”

So there's this idea of what story are you going to tell yourself about this bad thing that happened this thing that just got thrown in your life. It wasn't good. And there's two ways that people frame things as what's called contamination stories that is to say, this bad thing happened. It's contaminated in my life. Everything is going to be bad thereafter or there's redemptive stories where this bad thing happened. But did I learn something from it and can I at least see a lesson and a path out of it where I could end up better off or at least not broken by it.

And so to me, it sounds like you were almost thinking that with the bridge metaphor. Yeah, I mean, I would say it was it was both of those right. It was both of those kinds of stories. This thing happened to me and also I'm going to make something of it. And I should say to anybody listening to this.

The people closest to me would say I probably get too affected by things and also to to that point about the way we taught ourselves stories. I mean Michael, you're a journalist. You've worked in stories. You've written books, you know me and the way I really to the world is through story. Yeah, as you said that, I thought to myself, yeah, that it does feel like the way we frame our life does break down into those two categories.

“So you mentioned both of the same time, but you mentioned you had you were going through both. So were you going through mentally or you going through kind of swings along all these steps?”

Well, it was just like this, it was like this thing happened to me and I don't know what to do with it. Yeah, right. And I'm angry.

I wanted the world to stop for me and to mourn with me. Yeah, and I was angry that it didn't. Yeah, you're a new city. That place is never stopping.

Right. And then, you know, the cliche it always happens to the best ones. Yeah, it's like, why did this happen in him and not? And here I pull out my scroll of all the people who's all the villains of this world who deserve what he got. Why did it happen to them? You know, your typical existential wonderings when faced with something like that.

“And I think the reflects of desire be it out of some kind of guilt or some feeling of obligation and duty to the person who had involved to do something with it,”

rather than just be a shmuck for whom something happens to and then they go on with their lives. And also, I should say, it occurs to me that it was a way of keeping him close to me in that moment as many things still are. Which is kind of, I find how mourning works in a way is so much of the way we express pain is trying to keep that pain close to us. Because it's scary to go forward in life without this thing that you've come to know so much, whether it's a person and their love or the pain of losing them, it is scary to move forward without those things.

I feel like for me walking can sort of serve as a metaphor that you do move forward and that and that'll be swings along the way, where it sucks, you feel like hell. You'll also have highs and lows and that's kind of just like this metaphor for life, but you're still moving forward in that direction, you know.

Right, cutting back to that day, that fateful day. I've got the back back on. I'm crossing the westward bridge and I'm going, I can't believe I've never walked across them and haven't bridge.

So today, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to walk across them and haven't bridge. And the Manhattan Bridge, as far as bridges in New York, it's not all that iconic, it's between the Williamsburg and the Brooklyn Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, being the most iconic one, the Williamsburg Bridge, having arguably the best walking and bicycling path, and then Manhattan Bridge is a little less value-hood, I should say. It's a middle-level bridge, it's a very like, well, I have, I have a view on this.

Okay, let's hear it. I'm starting to walk across the bridge and I was expecting the absolute worst, which I would experience later that day, but I'm walking across this bridge and I'm going, oh my God.

“You know what I'm realizing about this bridge? I believe it is the highest of all of the bridge heights in New York.”

But at the very least, you are looking over the Brooklyn Bridge. So it is the best view you're going to get arguably of the Brooklyn Bridge out into New York Harbor. It's a beautiful view. The walking path is very small, the bicycling path, very small, but it's a beautiful view of the harbor. And so I'm standing in the middle of the bridge, looking at the view, going, Dan, this is nice, and I'm so glad I did this.

But you know what I've also never done? I've never walked across the Queensboro Bridge, and I say to myself, well, I don't have that much work to do today.

I mean, I told my coworkers that we had somebody was out, so I had to answer a couple calls or something, but it's like, I can spend the day doing this. I got enough battery on my phone and listen to music. I'm not that tired yet. What if I crossed all four of the major bridges? The Williamsburg Bridge, I'm going to happen bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Queensboro Bridge in one day.

And so off I go, cross and I happen bridge into a neighborhood called Dumbo, which is an acronym that stands for Down Under in a Handbridge Overpass. And I start walking to the Brooklyn Bridge, and I get on the Brooklyn Bridge.

And I cross the Brooklyn Bridge, which is no matter what time of year it is virtually always touristy and insane and ridiculous.

You know, if the Williamsburg Bridge is like lovely and a Syrian walk, and then Manhattan Bridge is just a tighter walk, a little bit more rough around the edges, but still pretty calm. The Brooklyn Bridge is always just teeming with people, you know, tick talkers and people selling stuff, and it's a different slice in New York.

“And I think, well, I want to stay by the water. This was one of my mistakes.”

Or not, depending on how you see it. So, I go, do east, on Manhattan, and I walk up the side of Manhattan, near the water. And this is the longest part of the walk, because now I'm at the bottom in Manhattan, so I'm going under the Manhattan Bridge, under the Williamsburg Bridge, all the way up to 57th Street. And I don't know how many blocks it is exactly from City Hall to 57th Street, where the Queensboro Bridge is. That's got to be at least six miles. Let's see, I'm doing, I'm doing the numbers right now.

It says, walking from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Queensboro Bridge, it's approximately 5.5 to 6 miles. This route generally falls a path along the east river, such as the second avenue where east river greenway. So I definitely took the longest version of that, which was six miles, and it is now midday, and the sun is beating down on me. I'm starting to feel it, it's a little bit warmer, humid, little bit summer, and I've got this backpack on my back.

“25 pounds, 30 pounds, something like that.”

So now I'm stopping at a park or two to take a sit.

I get up to the Queensboro Bridge, which I have, again, never crossed, doing something new.

I cannot in good faith, recommend walking across the Queensboro Bridge, because the walking and biking paths are one and the same. You're at level with the cars. So you're basically just a huff and smog. And when it drops you off, it drops you off in the middle of Queens. Now, if you are a tourist in New York, and you tell me you're going to this part of New York, I'm probably convinced that you're either lost or you've done something terribly wrong in your trip planning.

Yeah. I walk off the Queensboro Bridge and now I'm in Long Island City. Long Island City was actually the first neighborhood I moved to in New York, and I moved there with Henry in 2005. We shared a, it was a one bedroom apartment, the girl who lived there took the bedroom. We were sleeping on mattresses on the floor of the living room.

“Awesome. How far did you end up walking the entire day?”

Well, once I got to Queens, I was like, "All right, home stretch." Yeah. So I walked over the Plowsky Bridge that connects Long Island City to Green Point. Yeah. That's about 45 minutes from my place. And I got there and I said, "Well, you're all ready here. You might as well do the full app." I instead chose to walk south along the Green Point and Williamsburg waterfront all the way back to the base of the Williamsburg Bridge.

And then walk home, which is about 20 minutes from my place. So as opposed to walking 40 minutes from Green Point back to my place, I threw on another 40 minutes plus the 20 it takes to get from Williamsburg back to mine. And at that point, it was about 25 or 24 miles.

And then I get home, I take the bag off, holy shit, I've never felt anything like that.

Something where it was, well, just immediately I knew that typically, for anybody who's used a rucking backpack, you know the feeling of you take off the bag, you feel a sense of relief and lighter. It's like when you're done doing a heavy set of lifting weights, your arms feel a little bit more nimble and area. It can move through air a little bit more quickly. Same thing when you take off a rucking backpack after like a normal ruck. I take off the rucking backpack, I do not feel that. I just feel sore.

Like what have I done? I love the moment where you go, I've never crossed all the bridges. What if I gave it a shot like that insight? I wonder where that came from, where you're kind of doing something that's, you know, you're pushing your edge a little bit and you just go.

That's the best.

I've had a few of those moments in my life where I'm out doing something.

You just go, what if I just keep going? Let's see what happens. And it's like you go into this unexplored zone where you're going to test this thing and see what you may be learned from it along the way. And I personally have found it's great for ideas. It's great for just kind of thinking. I mean, especially in your, I haven't done it after something that significant of my life happened like the loss of a friend or something.

But I can say I gain a lot of insights from good example when I did this crazy long hike in, you saw it last year. I came to like the center of my life and what I want to do with it and how I'm spending my time and that would not have happened if I were to just take a hour long walk around my house. It's like I had to really get out and get the time under my feet and let my mind just wander and go places and it found where it needed to go and I learned some things. I wish those moments would happen more in my life.

Totally, it was so inadvertent and it was born out of, it was born out of, I literally don't want to be in the house anymore. And it was a variation on the line you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to stay where I was.

“And so it's truly this moment of like, what if I just do this?”

And you saying that that's really interesting, like how often in life do we want to break out of the pattern and the thing that we're doing to get somewhere else?

I wish I could come across those moments every day. I wish I could break my routines with the moxie of wanting to change it up and the impetus to just try something and then go with it. Totally. And here I should mention that I did it a second year. Yes.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk across different bridges. So I load up the backpack. I fill it with a couple frozen bottles of ice water. It is even hotter this day than it was for a year before. So it is scorching.

The bridges I end up crossing are mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. And the only public transportation I took during this day was until I got to my final destination. The tram that takes you from Roosevelt Island down to the Queensboro Bridge.

I walk and also I'd never been on Roosevelt Island at this point lived in New York for, you know, 19 years, 18 years at this point.

Never been on Roosevelt Island.

“Never been on any of these bridges either.”

There's a reason for that. So I take the tram. I walk across Central Park. I walk across the Bo Bridge which goes over the pond in Central Park. It is fun fact.

The shortest pedestrian bridge in New York City. And one of the oldest. And I decide, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to walk all the way up to the George Washington Bridge from, what, 57th Street in Central Park. I walk all the way to the top of Central Park.

Never done that. 58th Street or at the wherever I was, the top of Central Park, whatever block that is 110th Street maybe. It's where you start tripping over needles in the park. You're on the west side, climbing up through Harlem. It is hot.

I was walking into bodegas.

“Looking like, oh, and I also had my camera with me, added a couple pounds.”

I mean, I was soaked in sweat, caked in dirt. I looked like I was trying to give myself dehydration. And what is it? Rabo, rabble dial, low cister, whatever the condition is. Yeah.

Where your muscles start breaking down. And poisoning your body. Rob now for sure. Rob though. Rob though.

Yeah. Yeah. Looks like I was trying to give myself that. I will say the nice thing about walking around New York is plenty of resources. You know, if you're out doing it in the wilderness, you're like, shit, I ran out of water.

I ran out of food. What am I going to do? There's a bodega right there. Oh, there's a bodega right there. He's got everything you can ever need.

That's that is correct. And. And so I get all the way up to the George Washington Bridge, which is well at the top of Manhattan. The George Washington Bridge connects New Jersey to Manhattan. And I get up to it.

And I am I'm just cooked and I walk across the George Washington Bridge, which is as far as Bridges go probably the most like epic and insane bridge of the mall traffic is going right by you. You are very high up. You're looking up the Hudson River to the Hudson Valley.

Awesome. Down at the rest of Manhattan. It's it's pretty epic, but it's also. You're walking in New Jersey.

And then there's a line says New Jersey.

And I look at it and I say, fuck this.

“No, I believe I said to myself, fuck New Jersey.”

And I turn around and start walking back. And I get about 50 feet. And I go. If you don't cross this bridge and get all the way to New Jersey side and back. This will haunt you for the rest of your life.

Got to finish. Got to finish. So I truck it. Go all the way over the New Jersey side. Look at it.

Experience a little bit of New Jersey trauma. If you're going to go up to the edge of the wasteland. You just got to get in. Take a peek. Listen, I put a foot in.

That was more than enough.

And then I turned around and hike back. And then I got on the A train. And took it all the way down to 14th Street. Got on the L. Took it back to my place.

And if I was sore the year before. This time, I was cooked cooked. I mean, I must have been sore for three days after. I, it was, it went from being an enjoyable, fun, ritual of discovery.

To this movie, Dick like Hunt. For new experiences that cost me body, mind and soul. So what did you learn in totality from this? Because we set this up by, you're not a person who would normally do this. Something prompted this that wasn't what you would hope for.

I mean, listen, I am, I am like many of your adherents to range enough to put on a backpack full of weight for the sake of doing so. Have you for the sake of being heavy? I learned exactly the thing that I set out to, which was the new things are possible.

And I would do well to internalize that.

“I think if anything, I failed to capitalize on that,”

maybe as much as I should or would have liked to. Now, certainly as much as I should or would have liked to. Because, and I already feel the cliche spilling out of me. But you don't really know what you're capable of until you try it. And it doesn't actually take that much to show you that or to demonstrate that.

Literally for me, it was just putting one foot in front of another. Yeah. And I did. And it was wonderful. And I don't want to be prescriptive about this.

But I think it would be incumbent upon me to find more opportunities to do that. And I don't, you know, it's like they say financial firms. Past performance does not indicate future results. So I don't want to make this promise to anybody. But I don't think most people are going to be the lesser for it.

100%. There's been talking and kind of telling this larger story. There was a guy who helped me get sober. Like the most influential person in that journey. And he got diagnosed with stage four colon cancer.

Similar to you, he goes, I was in the house. I didn't want to be in the house. I didn't really want to be anywhere else. So I just went outside and took a walk. And I'm taking a long walk.

And it goes somewhere along Mount Walk. I became okay with it. It is what it is. And he returned home with this totally different outlook. Now that dude knew we had stage four colon cancer.

Once he started helping me. I didn't know we had that until I had known him for like three months. And I think back to that all the time. Just the selflessness behind that and also where that comes from. Yeah.

“And I do think sometimes you need to go do something that allows you to process and reframe things.”

Yeah. And I think if you look at the grand history of humanity.

Walking has always been one of those things.

Why do people go on pilgrimage? Why do things happen? Mentor, you're going to walk and it appears as a physical act. It's not. It is a physical act.

But it's more a mental exploration in a way. I dare anybody listen to this. Who visits New York City or Paris or London. To go and put 20,000 steps in near the center of those cities. Don't retrace any of them.

Just 20,000. They'll take you by my count. You know, 200 minutes, give or take. So three hours. Your life won't prove dramatically.

That I will guarantee absent some tragedy or act of God. There is just nothing like going for a good walk.

It feels like a perfect night that I'm done. Floster. Thanks for coming on, man. Man, my pleasure. What a joy.

What a joy. All right. Let's wrap things up. Let's land the plane. So we have just talked to two people who are talking about really extreme forms of walking.

On one hand, we have this ridiculous Stephen King murderous scenario where these boys have to walk very far. And yes, it shows us that the human body is capable. It is capable of walking extreme distances if we need to. On the other hand, we have foster who without any training. End it up rocking more than a marathon across New York City.

These are unbelievable inspiring forms of walking. But at the same time raises a question. How many steps should you be getting day to day? I'm talking about in the trenches of daily life where you're not taking on these giant challenges.

“We're just like, how many steps do I need in order to be healthy?”

Now here's what I'll say.

You've probably heard the number is 10,000. Turns out that's a myth. So it was started by a Japanese pedometer manufacturer who named their pedometer the man-poke. And that translates to the 10,000 steps meter. That number's stuck.

There's a couple reasons for that. One, it's five figures rather than four. Two, it's very memorable. It's nice and round. The three, it's enough walking that you actually have to get out and take a walk in order to hit it.

So that number just sort of stuck. That's what everyone thought. Oh, that is the optimal number of steps a day. But then something happened. Scientists started digging into the data.

And they found that 10,000 steps isn't really the optimal number. So there are two ways to look at this.

“First, there is a daily step count that is sort of the bare minimum that you should get for health.”

And the second is sort of an optimal number.

It's higher. It gives you the greatest return on your health. The same time. It's quite a few steps. So the first number.

If you just want to hit the bare minimum of health benefits. And this is backed by a study in the Lancet. Plenty of other studies have looked into this. Researchers generally find that 7,000 steps a day is an ideal number that lets you sort of maximize your health benefits in the minimum amount of time possible. So if you're pressed for time, your goal should be 7,000 a day that helps you ward off most diseases.

It reduces your risk of dying early. That is a great number. That's that. More is better. So if you dive deeper into that data, the studies find that 12,000 steps a day allows you to absolutely maximize your health benefits.

And the catch is doing more than 12,000 it doesn't seem to reduce your risk of disease any further. Doesn't give you any more. Now that said, the benefits of going from 7,000 to 12,000 steps a day. But just a little bit better. It's not like a crazy difference.

So again, 7,000 if you want to hit the bare minimum. 12,000 will get you a little more benefits. Of course, it's going to take a lot more time. And then the inevitable question is, okay, great. Now that I know the real numbers, how do I actually get that amount of steps?

Let's say 7,000. Here's my advice.

“I think you should look for ways that you can add walking into things that you already have to do.”

One of my favorite stories about this comes from this woman who reads my 2% sub stack. Her name was Mary. She had a desk job where she would take phone calls all day. She was only getting 2 to 3,000 steps a day. What she did is she realized, oh,

I do have to take all these phone calls for work. But I do not have to take them sitting. So she started popping in headphones and taking her calls while walking. And she was able to get well past 7,000 steps a day. Nothing in her life changed except she started taking those phone calls while walking.

So the takeaway look for easy ways to add more walking in your life. As for me, and I may sound like a complete and utter psychopath for saying this. I get about 14,000 steps a day. At the same time, I'm not necessarily trying to. Instead, I happen to have an absolutely insane hunting dog named Duke.

And if he doesn't get the steps in, he is just going to go find a mission in my house. And it typically involves, I don't know, pulling down a computer monitor or a coffee maker. So he really incentivizes me to get in all those steps. That is our show for today. Thanks for checking it out. And thank you to Foster and Melissa for talking to us about the power of walking.

Do not forget to subscribe. And if you have a question, please put it in the comments or send us an email. And we will try and answer as many questions as possible. And if you want bonus points, send us that question in a voice memo or in video format. And we will have that.

We would absolutely love that.

As always, in closing, have fun.

Don't die.