We walk everywhere. Without a car, that’s a given, but then we intentionally chose a city where we could easily get to all of our daily needs on foot. A new hometown also had to have an efficient local bus system plus a train station that could give us access to other cities in France and all over Europe. The monetary savings were apparent immediately: no car payment, insurance, fuel, maintenance, parking fees, tolls, cleaning and detailing. No stress of fighting for a parking place, dings and scratches, parking or speeding tickets, theft. What we hadn’t considered were the health benefits and we just read about how to make that even better.

According to the website Good News Network—“a daily dose of positive news stories”—, upping the cadence of your daily walks can have a significantly positive influence on your health. The study was conducted by the University of Chicago Medicine (UCM) in the hopes of finding the key to preventing people from becoming frail. Seniors who are in this category are especially vulnerable to everyday stresses with an elevated risk of falls, hospitalization, and loss of independence. Symptoms can include weight loss, feeling tired, being weak, and slow movements.

Because the traditional method of pacing yourself at a walking rate where you can still carry on a conversation can be subjective, the UCM scientists chose a steps-per-minute approach. That resulted in their suggestion to increase your speed to a target of 100 steps-per-minute, or about 14 more steps per minute than a typical walking pace. The corresponding speed equates to about 4.5 km/hr or 2.8 miles/hr. While awaiting the release of the research team’s smartphone app, Walk Test, it’s easy enough to go the do-it-yourself route. You can use a metronome app set at 100 beats per minute or like I did, play the audio portion of the YouTube video “100 BPM Metronome [1Hour]”.  That made it very simple to keep in step.

While much of our walking around town is needs-driven, there are plenty of recreational routes along the river, the canal, and into the mountains, all promoted by a map from the local office of tourism. In Paris, I saw that they have themed walking tours focusing on different neighborhoods (e.g., Le Marais, Montmartre, Latin Quarter), historical periods, or specific interests like literary Paris or street art tours.

For the bigger picture, the Fédération Française de la Randonnée Pédestre (French Hiking Federation) marks and maintains an extensive network of long-distance walking paths, called GR® for Grand Randonnée, across France. Some especially popular routes include:

GR®10: Traverses the entire Pyrenees mountain range from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

GR®20: Crossing Corsica.

GR®34: Follows the entire coast of Brittany.

GR®65: A major French section of the Camino de Santiago

A thank-you to Sally and Larry for providing two of today’s photos, both along the GR®34 in Brittany: the featured one is the kite festival in Porspoder. With beautiful walking routes like that, I’m not sure I’d want to rush through at 100 steps per minute!