The R. E. Hawes Medical Building casts a dark square shadow down its sloped lawn and onto Allston’s Warren Street. On the other side of it lies the Brighton Marine complex, where Christopher Boucher has taken his students every spring for the last six years.
Usually around this time of year, Boucher, an author and professor at Boston College, would be traipsing around Boston with the students in his Walking Infinite Jest class, reading passages from the book in the very places they were set. But today, they’re visiting on Google Maps.
Because students have been sent home for the semester and can only visit virtually, Boucher said, “Now we’re all isolated and stuck inside, and even the most ‘communal’ activities have become solitary.”
But Warren Street, even without Boucher’s gaggle of college students, is more heavily trafficked than ever these days. As work, school, and social gatherings are forced online in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, people all over the world are walking for exercise, to get out of the house, or just for something to do.
“Walking is one of the only things you still can do right now,” says Kate Kraft, executive director of the pedestrian advocacy organization America Walks. “People are taking advantage of public space to keep active and get more connected to their communities.”
On the street outside the R. E. Hawes Medical Building, a white-haired woman in a lavender sweatsuit walks by slowly, hunched over. A runner in shorts much too optimistic for today’s dreary forecast gives her a wide berth as he passes. A couple holding gloved hands exchanges waves from a distance with a man carrying his daughter on his shoulders. Almost everyone — even the runner — is wearing cloth masks.
“Taking walks outside is an excellent way of relieving stress and staying active while most of us are hunkering down at home,” says Don Morgan, an exercise physiologist and professor at Middle Tennessee State University. “It can also reduce the likelihood of needing to visit the doctor’s office during this pandemic outbreak.”
While government officials and health professionals recommend people stay home as much as possible, being in open air — as long as there aren’t a lot of others around — actually reduces the likelihood of catching the virus, according to Morgan.
“As long as you’re practicing social distancing, going for a walk is really good for your body during a pandemic,” Kraft says.
Walking outside can strengthen the immune system and help people breathe better, she says — two benefits uniquely suited to combat coronavirus. But even outside the context of a global pandemic, she gushes over the benefits of walking.
“Walking can help ease arthritis, it reduces the risk of a number of different cancers, it’s good for your mental health,” Kraft says. “And then basically everything exercise is good for, walking is good for, even though it’s the most low impact.”
Going for a walk, already safe, may be even safer during this period of widespread social isolation according to Kraft. With most people at home, streets have less car traffic that puts pedestrians at risk. Some cities, including Denver and New York City, have closed some of their streets to cars altogether.
However, some hotbeds of the pandemic have also closed the outdoors to people.
CASAMASSIMA, ITALY
Gaetano Zappacosta hadn’t missed a day of walking in more than a year. After getting a fitness tracker as a Christmas gift in 2018, he resolved to get in shape starting on New Year’s Day of 2019. Unlike most New Year’s resolutions, Zappacosta’s lasted the whole year. And he kept it going into 2020, too, walking an average of seven to nine kilometers per day even after he lost the 10 kilograms he set out to shed.
“On January 1, 2019, I was overweight,” Zappacosta says. “Walking was something I liked, but it was also something I needed.”
He usually walks alone, with the company of an Italian news podcast or some Beethoven. On weekends, he says, he may invite one of his friends for a leisurely 10-kilometer stroll (for Americans, that’s more than six miles).
Zappacosta works as a flight attendant — or at least, he thinks he still has a job. With travel shut down into, out of, and within Italy, he’s out of work at least until the virus subsides in the country. But his job has never interfered with his walking — it just means a lot of it is done around airport hotels. Four hundred and thirty-three days in a row, Gaetano Zappacosta laced up his breathable (important, he says!) sneakers and went out for a walk.
“I really feel I’m exercising both my body and my brain,” Zappacosta says. “This helps me to relieve my stress, and my sleep has improved a lot.”
But when Italy issued a mandatory stay-at-home order on March 9, his streak ended.
“Now, it is forbidden even if I walk my path alone, which is outside my town [of Casamassima],” Zappacosta says. “I feel sad now, I’m so stressed and I have so much energy I can’t really use.”
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
In Seattle, the first site of major infection in the United States, Vanessa Waruma is also staying home more than she’d like. While most of the country was still going into work and school, or hanging out with friends, Seattle saw the first six deaths from coronavirus in North America. That was on March 2, more than a week before President Donald Trump declared a national state of emergency.
“Being in Seattle, I’ve been working from home for about three weeks now,” Waruma said in late March. “I’d been pretty much sheltering in place even before the order came down from the governor.”
Waruma started walking regularly in 2003, when her job moved her to Tokyo. Dropped into an unfamiliar city, she began creating a roving database of her new home. She walked a new route to work each day, making her commute take anywhere between an hour and two hours each way. On weekends, she widened her radius even further.
“I would take trains to different neighborhoods and then walk around, exploring for hours,” Waruma says. “I never got tired of it. I was so enamored by everything around me.”
After moving back stateside, she discovered she had lost her appetite for most other methods of transportation altogether. What had started as a purely utilitarian way to get from one place to the next ended up improving her mood, lessening the pain from a chronic back problem, and acting as a sort of moving daily meditation.
Now, at 47, she still walks more than two hours on a typical pre-Covid-19 day, including her commute and an hour-long walk at lunch with whichever coworker is up to it.
“I don’t have a car, and I don’t like to ride the bus,” Waruma says. “If I can walk someplace in two hours or less, then I just walk it.”
She’s glad she doesn’t have to completely give up her preferred method of transportation in the era of coronavirus. But now, 17 years into what she expects will be a lifetime of walking, she has to make a few adjustments to her routine.
“Now, instead of walking to and from work and at lunch, I’m now walking for an hour at lunch and 60 to 90 minutes after my work day is done.”
And while people around the globe are using the pandemic as an opportunity to catch up on rest and relaxation, Waruma is itching to get out of the house even more than normal.
“In the past I used to sometimes take weekends off,” she says, “but now the need to get out of the house has me taking two-plus-hour walkabouts on the weekend, trying to avoid people and seeking out less beaten paths.”
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
In places where the situation isn’t as dire and the restrictions aren’t as stiff, some avid walkers still have to limit their usual routines.
For Alison Bellon, walking has long been a vital part of her health and self care. Her left lung collapsed when she was two weeks old, leaving her with a less-than-ideal respiratory system to begin with. The threat of catching coronavirus, scary for the average person, looms even darker for Bellon — if she got it, she says, there’s a good chance she’d die.
Growing up, Bellon tried to ignore her health problem to play soccer and softball, but couldn’t keep up with her friends and teammates who each had two functioning lungs.
“I generally found myself more comfortable in the positions that required the least cardio, like goalie or catcher,” she says, then chuckles. “The problem was, I wasn’t very good at them.”
Soon, after spending too much time on the field catching her breath and sometimes hyperventilating or even passing out, Bellon started to walk. In her native Los Angeles, the highway capital of the world, walking as a form of transportation is laughable. But she found that the more she did it, the less out of breath she felt. She noticed her muscles bulking up, until eventually she could start tackling longer distances and hikes outside the city.
Now, she walks to work — two miles there and back — and pretty much everywhere else. In addition to running errands and meeting up with friends, Bellon lets herself splurge on fancy restaurants, takeout, or sweet treats as long as she walks there.
“My favorite ice cream shop that has the most spectacular rosewater ice cream is a little over three miles away,” she says. “So if I want it, I have to walk to it and back.”
She’s also discovered new local gems on foot, including a Mexican ramen place and a privately owned stone castle with a working drawbridge. Now, as the pandemic pushes Los Angelenos onto sidewalks they may never have walked before, she’s noticing her neighbors making new discoveries themselves.
“I can hear them outside appreciating and pointing to unique architecture or things that they have never noticed before, like the sidewalk stamp outside my house that says it was constructed in 1923.”
Bellon is self-isolating as much as she can to avoid getting infected, which means her daily walks are moving earlier and earlier to avoid the ever-rising numbers of newly inducted walkers hitting the pavement in her neighborhood.
“I have been getting up around 5 a.m. and walking around my neighborhood for an hour or two,” Bellon says. “But I head back as soon as I start seeing other people starting their walks.”
NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Boucher is still walking, too, but now in western Massachusetts, 90 miles away from Warren Street and the R. E. Hawes Medical Building. And he doesn’t have to lug a 1,000-plus-page copy of Infinite Jest around with him anymore.
“I have a five- and a seven-year-old, so I’m always thinking about how and when we’re going to get out of the house next,” Boucher says.
Boucher includes himself in a list of fiction writers who loved to walk. Charles Dickens regularly walked around 12 miles in a day, according to his biographer. Wallace Stevens, a New Englander, never learned to drive and walked two and a half miles to and from work daily. Boucher’s own formal introduction to the inner circle of Boston-based Jest fanatics came on a walk — a day-long one with Bill Lattanzi, a writer who compiled one of the most comprehensive maps of the book’s setting.
“We took a whole afternoon,” Boucher recalls. “We walked through the Brighton Marine Hospital, went past the Citgo sign… we walked all the way to Cambridge.”
Like Bellon, he’s found some sites on his walks around the book’s setting that he would have missed in a car (or on Google Earth). Off Warren Street, there’s a small plaque that claims a sloping park as the site of the tennis academy where much of the book is set. In Cambridge’s Inman Square, he met a worker at Ryles Jazz Club who knew an old club regular that inspired one of author David Foster Wallace’s characters personally.
And while Boucher can’t walk his usual routes anymore, he’s making do.
“There’s really two ways to look at this whole thing,” he says. “One is to focus on the things we can’t do, and the other is to start doing some new things.”
