Nordic Walking

Currently, I'm vacationing in Vermont. It's the best sort of tourist destination because no other tourists would even contemplate coming here, hence, it's not overrun with tourists, only a handful of locals. The public schools here must not teach geography or else the citizens surely would have found a better place to live. I've been here four days now and it's thunder stormed each day, so I've had a great opportunity to catch up on reading, do jigsaw puzzles, and look at cows.

This morning, before the rain, my family and I went for a walk. A walk, however, is boring even by Vermont's standards, so someone developed a way to sex it up: nordic walking. Nordic walking is just like walking, but with poles; it's sort of like cross-country skiing, minus the skis. Thousands of years of evolution have afforded humans bipedalism (or for the Jesus-inclined, on the sixth day, God totally made man be all upright and stuff), so it seems a little counterproductive to add extra limbs to the simplest of activities (with sincere apologies to the physically disabled.) When being handed the equipment, I wanted to decline. "No thanks, I walk just fine on my own two feet, actually." Evidently, however, nordic walking is a more complete workout; by poking the ground with sticks, walkers receive an arm workout in addition to the usual leg exercise. I buy that, I guess. It might look stupid, but a lot of forms of exercise appear silly; consider thigh masters, synchronized swimming, and Dancin' Grannies.

Before we started, I privately laughed at the idea of walking with poles. Surely it's a joke, how hard could it be? Indeed, it was simple -- for everyone else. I kid you not, I couldn't do it. You're supposed to poke the poles behind you as you move, poking with the opposite arm of the foot you're stepping with as you stride. For whatever reason, however, I was confounded by this process. Despite my best efforts, I kept poking and stepping with the same side of my body. At the beginning, the instructor twice attempted to correct me. As the instructor pointed out, it's an entirely natural motion. When you walk, the arm on the opposite side of your body that you're striding with swings simultaneously. Though this fact is true of me, as soon as I tried to replicate the same movement with the poles in hand, I fell into the old pattern of awkwardly maneuvering my same-sided appendages concurrently. Finding me a bit pitiful, the instructor gave up on trying to fix me.

Eventually, I managed to fall into the proper stride, but not without deep concentration. I legitimately had to focus on my movements the entire time or I would slip back into doing it incorrectly. It ended up being an exhausting mental workout for me since it required my utmost attention for an extended period. Mind you, no one else had this problem, just Kevin, the most uncoordinated idiot around. Apparently, I'm not even capable of walking and holding sticks at the same time.