Walking can transform your life, by improving your physical health and social connections. Bernie Victory talks about how getting involved in a charity walk led to losing weight, feeling healthier, and making new friends. He has found walking to inspire him to travel both locally and overseas to walking destinations.
“I find that the group I walk with, they’re a group of people with a huge range of skills. I think that’s one of the great things about walking, you can be together as equals within an enormous number and enormousness range of people, and it’s a great equality.”
Throughout October we’re celebrating walking with #walktoberSA
Transcript:
I’m in a walking group that doesn’t actually have a name. It’s just a loose collection of people that are strung together by a weekly email, but there’s about 200 people that get the email, and on every Saturday there’d be somewhere between 20 and 50 people walking.
I find that the group I walk with, they’re a group of people with a huge range of skills. I think that’s one of the great things about walking, you can be together as equals within an enormous number and enormousness range of people, and it’s a great equality.
The way the walking works is there will be a walk, and there’ll be coffee at the end of the walk, and at the end of coffee someone will say “Has anyone been to Mt Hayfield?”, or “I want to go to Borneo, and do the death march,” and I just recently came back from the Bungle Bungles, and to find places in Australia that I didn’t know existed, that were just so beautiful, and just so stunning, I was in awe for days.
Every coffee leads to another walk, and every walk leads to more contacts and more connections.
It was 2003, and I had decided to do the Kodaka Track. It was a fundraiser for work, and it came at just the right time, because I got very unfit over the last twenty or so years, and I was significantly overweight, and I knew that if I was going to do the Kodaka Track I would have to walk, I’d have to train. Doing the Kokoda with people, who six months before could barely get out of bed, and wouldn’t get out of bed, to see them reach a level of fitness, and to finish the track, and that sheer moment of joy, that’s always a moment of great inspiration.
