Pen Hanley's Blog

In Praise of Walking and 52 Ways To Walk

The importance of core control

In Praise of Walking by Shane O’Mara, 52 Ways To Walk by Annabel Streets and Howard Jacobson’s The Dog’s Last Walk. Can you spot a theme here? Okay, the last is a joke but it was on my reading pile and I’d been enthusiastic about walking five or six kilometres a day again and wanted to reinforce my intent with some scientific facts about the physical and mental benefits of regular walking. The first two books offer ample evidence that if those benefits could be put in a pill some drug corporation would be making billions out of it.

Then after a variety of circumstances, I was hit by severe vertigo, (Glad to see ‘benign’ at the start of the doctor’s diagnosis though – can’t imagine how awful this would be if it were chronic!) Benign or not, it put paid to my resolution to walk. As for cycling and tangoing, they were like a distant dream. How glad I was though of my years of tango practice. The Argentine tango is based on intense core control. When the vertigo struck and the world went topsy-turvy, it was instant and instinctive that I felt a steel-like column kick in within me. This meant that I might have been walking in the wrong direction, but my core held me upright when everything else preventing me from collapsing onto the ground had suddenly gone on holiday!

Who Killed JFK? and British Scandal

At first I couldn’t even read without nausea. Thank God for podcasts: Who Killed JFK? presented by Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien gripped my psyche while the world around me swirled. New evidence, new interviews – and Rob Reiner (director of my favourite, The Princess Bride, and When Harry met Sally) really knows how to tell a story. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Continue Reading In Praise of Walking and 52 Ways To Walk…