Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

Many times I would be talking or emailing a friend and hear or read,

Wow! You reached there already?

I walk about three miles an hour. That is pretty slow in today’s world. Consider the distance that I would walk on a big day: 20 miles. A person could drive that route 10 or 15 times in a day.

I was talking to some gentlemen at a store one day in Alabama. I told them that I was heading for New Orleans. On man told me that New Orleans was about a nine-hour drive. I replied that it was about a four-week walk. Wow. What a difference – one day versus four weeks.

Walking is slow.

But walking is faster than most people realize. Covering 15 to 20 miles a day and walking six days in a week means moving

100 miles down the road in a week

That number surprises almost everyone (who isn’t doing the walking). That 100-miles-per-week pace hit me when I was in Virginia and saw a sign stating that Knoxville, Tennessee was about a hundred miles away. My first thought was, “100 miles! When will we ever get there?” Then I ran the calculations, and in a week I was in Knoxville.

Walking is slow, but if you keep walking in the right direction day after day, you cover a lot of miles in 65 days.