[wordup] You walk wrong

[Adam Shand]

Hopefully my new running fixation doesn't bore the crap out of  
everybody.  If it does ... err ... sorry.  :-)

Source: http://www.nymag.com/health/features/46213

You Walk Wrong
By Adam Sternbergh
Published Apr 21, 2008

It took 4 million years of evolution to perfect the human foot. But  
we’re wrecking it with every step we take.

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Walking is easy. It’s so easy that no one ever has to teach you how to  
do it. It’s so easy, in fact, that we often pair it with other easy  
activities—talking, chewing gum—and suggest that if you can’t do both  
simultaneously, you’re some sort of insensate clod. So you probably  
think you’ve got this walking thing pretty much nailed. As you stroll  
around the city, worrying about the economy, or the environment, or  
your next month’s rent, you might assume that the one thing you don’t  
need to worry about is the way in which you’re strolling around the  
city.

Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: You walk wrong.

Look, it’s not your fault. It’s your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don’t  
just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles,  
or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we  
wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They  
change how you walk. In fact, your feet—your poor, tender, abused,  
ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet—are getting trounced in a war  
that’s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes  
versus feet.

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in  
Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus  
Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the  
podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from  
three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European),  
comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000- 
year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the  
invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern  
subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the  
healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers— 
had the unhealthiest. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Bernhard  
Zipfel, when commenting on his findings, lamented that the American  
Podiatric Medical Association does not “actively encourage outdoor  
barefoot walking for healthy individuals. This flies in the face of  
the increasing scientific evidence, including our study, that most of  
the commercially available footwear is not good for the feet.”

Okay, so shoes can be less than comfortable. If you’ve ever suffered  
through a wedding in four-inch heels or patent-leather dress shoes,  
you’ve probably figured this out. But does that really mean we don’t  
walk correctly? (Yes.) I mean, don’t we instinctively know how to  
walk? (Yes, sort of.) Isn’t walking totally natural? Yes—but shoes  
aren’t.

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing  
person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry  
Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot  
and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of  
bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one  
carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure  
anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency,  
afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural  
grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet  
good. Shoes bad.

Perhaps this sounds to you like scientific gobbledygook or the ravings  
of some radical back-to-nature nuts. In that case, you should listen  
to Galahad Clark. Clark is 32 years old, lives in London, and is about  
as unlikely an advocate for getting rid of your shoes as you could  
find. For one, he’s a scion of the Clark family, as in the English  
shoe company C&J Clark, a.k.a. Clarks, founded in 1825. Two, he  
currently runs his own shoe company. So it’s a bit surprising when he  
says, “Shoes are the problem. No matter what type of shoe. Shoes are  
bad for you.”

This is especially grim news for New Yorkers, who (a) tend to walk a  
lot, and (b) tend to wear shoes while doing so.

I know what you’re thinking: If shoes are so bad for me, what’s my  
alternative?

Simple. Walk barefoot.

Okay, now I know what you’re thinking: What’s my other alternative?

Galahad Clark never intended to get into the shoe business, let alone  
the anti-shoe business. And he likely never would have, if it weren’t  
for the Wu-Tang Clan. Clark went to the University of North Carolina,  
where he studied Chinese and anthropology. He started listening to the  
Wu-Tang, the Staten Island rap collective with a fetish for martial- 
arts films and, oddly, Wallabee shoes. As it happens, Clark’s father  
had invented the Wallabee shoe. “I figured this was my chance to go  
hang out with them,” Clark says. “One thing led to another, and we  
developed a line of shoes together. That’s what sucked me back into  
the industry.”

After college, Clark returned to England, where he started working  
with Terra Plana, a company devoted to ecologically responsible shoes,  
and started United Nude, a high-design shoe brand, with the architect  
Rem D. Koolhaas. Then, in 2000, Clark was approached by Tim Brennan, a  
young industrial-design student at the Royal College of Art. Brennan  
was an avid tennis player who suffered from chronic knee and ankle  
injuries. His father taught the Alexander Technique, a discipline that  
studies the links between kinetics and behavior; basically, the  
connection between how we move and how we act. Brennan’s father  
encouraged Tim to try playing tennis barefoot. Tim was skeptical at  
first, but tried it, and found that his injuries disappeared. So he  
set out to design a shoe that was barely a shoe at all: no padding, no  
arch support, no heel. His prototype consisted of a thin fabric upper  
with a microthin latex-rubber sole. It wasn’t exactly a new idea. It  
was a modern update of the 600-year-old moccasin.

Next: The unnatural design feature built into nearly every shoe.

Brennan brought his shoe to Clark, and after some modifications, they  
came up with a very flexible leather shoe with a three-millimeter sole  
made of rubber and puncture-resistant DuraTex that they call the Vivo  
Barefoot. “There are no gimmicks,” Clark says. “It’s a back-to-basics  
philosophy: that the great Lord designed us perfectly to walk around  
without shoes.”
At first glance, this seems like a sensible and obvious approach—to  
work with the foot, not against it. But it represents a fundamental  
break from the dominant philosophy of shoe design. For decades, the  
guiding principle of shoe design has been to compensate for the  
perceived deficiencies of the human foot. Since it hurts to strike  
your heel on the ground, nearly all shoes provide a structure to lift  
the heel. And because walking on hard surfaces can be painful, we wrap  
our feet in padding. Many people suffer from flat feet or fallen  
arches, so we wear shoes with built-in arch supports, to help hold our  
arches up.

There are, of course, a thousand other factors that have influenced  
shoe design through the ages; for example, people like shoes that look  
nice. High heels have never, ever been comfortable, but they do make  
the wearer feel sexy. In fact, the idea of strolling idly through  
urban environments has only been fashionable, or even feasible, in  
Western society for about 200 years. Before that, cities had few real  
sidewalks, the streets were swimming in sewage, and walking as a form  
of locomotion was associated with poverty and the working class. “Only  
the upper classes, and especially women, could wear shoes that clearly  
defined an inability to walk very far,” writes Peter McNeil and  
Giorgio Riello in the essay “Walking the Streets of London and Paris:  
Shoes in the Enlightenment.” Walking was for peasants, who were  
“barefoot and pregnant”; the rich, or “well-heeled,” took carriages.

Of course, more recently we’ve become interested in shoes that are  
promoted as being comfortable, whether they’re cushioned walking shoes  
or high-tech sneakers with pumps and torsion bars. Still, the basic  
philosophy—that shoes have to augment, or in some cases supersede, or  
in some cases flat-out ignore, the way your foot works naturally—has  
remained the same. We were not born with air bubbles in our soles, so  
Nike provided them for us.

Try this test: Take off your shoe, and put it on a tabletop. Chances  
are the toe tip on your shoes will bend slightly upward, so that it  
doesn’t touch the table’s surface. This is known as “toe spring,” and  
it’s a design feature built into nearly every shoe. Of course, your  
bare toes don’t curl upward; in fact, they’re built to grip the earth  
and help you balance. The purpose of toe spring, then, is to create a  
subtle rocker effect that allows your foot to roll into the next step.  
This is necessary because the shoe, by its nature, won’t allow your  
foot to work in the way it wants to. Normally your foot would roll  
very flexibly through each step, from the heel through the outside of  
your foot, then through the arch, before your toes give you a powerful  
propulsive push forward into the next step. But shoes aren’t designed  
to be very flexible. Sure, you can take a typical shoe in your hands  
and bend it in the middle, but that bend doesn’t fall where your foot  
wants to bend; in fact, if you bent your foot in that same place, your  
foot would snap in half. So to compensate for this lack of  
flexibility, shoes are built with toe springs to help rock you  
forward. You only need this help, of course, because you’re wearing  
shoes.
Here’s another example: If you wear high heels for a long time, your  
tendons shorten—and then it’s only comfortable for you to wear high  
heels. One saleswoman I spoke to at a running-shoe store described  
how, each summer, the store is flooded with young women complaining of  
a painful tingling in the soles of their feet—what she calls “flip- 
flop-itis,” which is the result of women’s suddenly switching from  
heeled winter boots to summer flip-flops. This is the shoe paradox:  
We’ve come to believe that shoes, not bare feet, are natural and  
comfortable, when in fact wearing shoes simply creates the need for  
wearing shoes.

Okay, but what about a good pair of athletic shoes? After all, they  
swaddle your foot in padding to protect you from the unforgiving  
concrete. But that padding? That’s no good for you either. Consider a  
paper titled “Athletic Footwear: Unsafe Due to Perceptual Illusions,”  
published in a 1991 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and  
Exercise. “Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as  
having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning,  
‘pronation correction’) are injured significantly more frequently than  
runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40).” According  
to another study, people in expensive cushioned running shoes were  
twice as likely to suffer an injury—31.9 injuries per 1,000  
kilometers, as compared with 14.3—than were people who went running in  
hard-soled shoes.

Next: Learning to walk properly.

Admittedly, there’s something counterintuitive about the idea that  
less padding on your foot equals less shock on your body. But that’s  
only if we continue to think of our feet as lifeless blocks of flesh  
that hold us upright. The sole of your foot has over 200,000 nerve  
endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body.  
Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance  
and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on.
But (you might say) if you walk or run with no padding, it’s murder on  
your heels—which is precisely the point. Your heels hurt when you walk  
that way because you’re not supposed to walk that way. Wrapping your  
heels in padding so they don’t hurt is like stuffing a gag in  
someone’s mouth so they’ll stop screaming—you’re basically telling  
your heels to shut up.

And your heels aren’t just screaming; they’re trying to tell you  
something. In 2006, a group of rheumatologists at Chicago’s Rush  
Medical College studied the force of the “knee adduction moment”— 
basically, the force of torque on the medial chamber of the knee joint  
where arthritis occurs. For years, rheumatologists have advised  
patients with osteoarthritis of the knees to wear padded walking  
shoes, to reduce stress on their joints. As for the knee-adduction  
moment, they’ve attempted to address it with braces and orthotics that  
immobilize the knee, but with inconsistent results. So the researchers  
at Rush tried something different: They had people walk in their  
walking shoes, then barefoot, and each time measured the stress on  
their knees. They found, to their surprise, that the impact on the  
knees was 12 percent less when people walked barefoot than it was when  
people wore the padded shoes.

“If you can imagine a really big, insulated shoe on your foot, when  
you walk, you kind of stomp on your foot,” says Dr. Najia Shakoor, the  
studies’ lead researcher. “The way your foot hits the ground is very  
forceful. As opposed to a bare foot, where you have a really natural  
motion from your heel to your toe. We now think that’s associated with  
more shock absorption: the flexibility your foot provides, as well as  
a lack of a heel. Most shoes, even running shoes, have a fairly  
substantial heel built into them. And heels, we now know, can increase  
knee load.” Another factor, she points out, is that when your foot can  
feel the ground, it sends messages to the rest of your body. “Your  
body tells itself, My foot just hit the ground, I’m about to start  
walking, so let’s activate all these mechanisms to keep my joints  
safe. Your body’s natural neuromechanical-feedback mechanisms can work  
to protect the rest of your extremities. You have much more sensory  
input than when you’re insulated by a thick outsole.”

The same holds true with athletic shoes. In a 1997 study, researchers  
Steven Robbins and Edward Waked at McGill University in Montreal found  
that the more padding a running shoe has, the more force the runner  
hits the ground with: In effect, we instinctively plant our feet  
harder to cancel out the shock absorption of the padding. (The study  
found the same thing holds true when gymnasts land on soft mats—they  
actually land harder.) We do this, apparently, because we need to feel  
the ground in order to feel balanced. And barefoot, we can feel the  
ground—and we can naturally absorb the impact of each step with our  
bodies. “Whereas humans wearing shoes underestimate plantar loads,”  
the study concluded, “when barefoot they sense it precisely.”


Six students, of which I am one, have gathered in a studio at the  
Breathing Project in Chelsea, to learn how to walk properly. “Walking  
itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the  
body, to breathing and the beating of the heart,” wrote Rebecca Solnit  
inWanderlust: A History of Walking, and this is what we’re aiming for,  
more or less, as we circle the room slowly, in our bare feet, under  
the eye of our instructor, Amy Matthews. She’s a former dancer who now  
does private movement therapy, as well as teaching yoga, anatomy, and  
kinesiology classes as part of her Embodied Asana workshops. This is  
day two of a ten-week class on the leg that started, conveniently for  
my purposes, with the foot. Last week, Matthews showed the students  
how you should roll through each step as you walk, rather than simply  
clomping your feet up and down—a lesson that everyone is now  
struggling to apply. When Matthews asks the class how things went over  
the past week, one woman is not thinking so much about internal  
rhythms or the beating of the heart. Instead, she says, “I learned one  
thing: Walking’s hard.”

Next: Are there barefoot walkers in New York City?


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MASAI BAREFOOT TECHNOLOGY The thick sole mimics the soft, unstable  
ground on which our ancestors walked. But your foot won’t roll through  
each step—the sole does the rolling for you.
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NIKE FREE After decades of gimmicky shoes, Nike released the Free:  
light and flexible, and available in various stages, with Free 5.0  
pitched as halfway to barefoot.
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VIVO BAREFOOT Basically a leather slipper with a 3-mm.-thick puncture- 
resistant sole. It’s thin enough to feel pebbles underfoot and  
flexible enough to fold in half like a wallet.
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VIBRAM FIVE FINGERS This fabric-and-rubber sock with individuated toes  
is primarily for outdoor sports like kayaking—though at least one  
entrant wore them to run in the Boston Marathon.

I too have learned one thing—that if you’re interested in learning  
about barefoot walking, or the “barefoot lifestyle,” as it’s sometimes  
called, there are lots of people out there who are interested in  
teaching you. Websites like barefooters.org, the official site of the  
Society for Barefoot Living, will stridently explain that, for  
example, it is generally not illegal to drive barefoot, despite what  
you’ve heard. (This is true.) And that only a few state health  
departments forbid people from going barefoot in restaurants (also  
true), never mind all those signs that say no shirt, no shoes, no  
service, which are the handiwork of fascistic barefoot-haters.

Follow these enthusiasts too far, though, and you fall down a rabbit  
hole of eccentricity. While there are many legitimate and relatively  
non-cuckoo clubs for barefoot hiking across the country, my search for  
some walking–barefoot–in–New York City enthusiasts led me to  
barefoot .meetup.com, which led me to Keith (“I’m a 43-year-old man  
looking to meet new friends with my same interests”), which led me to  
“Dafizzle” (“I like dirty feet and want to meet others who love  
walking in the city with dirty feet”), which led me to Ricky (“I’m a  
24-year-old male looking for females that like to have their feet  
played with”). Which led me to abandon my search for a barefoot- 
walking group in New York.

But any worries I have that Amy Matthews’s class will be consumed with  
flaky spirit quests or roving toe-fetishists are quickly dispelled as  
she pulls out a model of a skeletal foot. We spend the next hour  
learning about the 24 (or, for some people, 26) bones in the foot,  
from the calcaneus (heel bone) to the tips of our phalanges (toe  
bones). There’s so much information to absorb that, by the time we are  
back up and walking again, I’ve already more or less forgotten the  
distinction between the cuneiform and the cuboid. So it’s difficult  
for me to examine other people’s feet while they’re at a standstill,  
which is our next assignment. Which I figure is fine, given that,  
unlike the rest of these people, I consider myself a very accomplished  
walker. I mean, sure, I have occasional back pain, and okay, when I  
walk long distances, I feel a grinding pain in my hip that I never  
used to feel before. And, yes, when I visited Michael Bulger, a  
structural integrationist near Washington Park with an expertise in  
“Rolfing,” a kind of deep-tissue massage, and he Rolfed one of my  
feet, then had me walk around a bit for a before-and-after comparison,  
I felt, thanks to my un-Rolfed foot, like a pirate walking on a peg leg.

Still, I’m feeling pretty confident when it’s my turn to have my feet  
assessed. The other students examine. They confer. They seem  
concerned. Apparently, my ankle bones are stacked like a tower of  
Jenga blocks that’s about to topple.

Then Matthews sits splay-legged in front of me, puts her hand on my  
ankle, and asks me to move my talus bone. Weirdly, I’m able to do  
this. She explains that, when we don’t use our feet properly, our  
muscles have to strain to compensate—not just in our feet but in our  
whole body. She asks me to lift the front of my foot, which I also do.  
She then replants my foot and asks me to “trust my bones to hold me up.”

And I have to tell you, in that brief moment, it felt like I had never  
stood up properly on my own two feet before in my entire life.

After class, I put my chunky Blundstone boots back on, and I tried to  
replicate that feeling of “standing on my bones.” I couldn’t, mostly  
because in my shoes, my feet couldn’t even feel the ground. I spent  
the rest of the day clomping around the city feeling like a guy  
wearing concrete blocks, waiting to be thrown in the East River.

Life consists of what a man is thinking of all day,” said Ralph Waldo  
Emerson, and right now I’m thinking of my feet. I’m test-driving a  
pair of Galahad Clark’s Vivo Barefoot shoes, which makes it hard to  
think about anything else.

Barefoot running has been a subject of interest for serious runners  
for decades, at least since Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila ran the Olympic  
marathon in Rome in 1960 in bare feet—and won. But barefoot running is  
a difficult discipline that needs to be learned properly, and you  
certainly shouldn’t be getting advice about it from me, someone who  
gets winded running for a cab. The real question for New Yorkers is,  
What about barefoot walking? Is it possible we could be walking  
better? Well, if my first few minutes in the Vivo Barefoot is any  
indication, the answer is, Ouch. Yes. Ouch.

Next: Testing shoes designed to simulate being barefoot.

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Barefoot walking is, in its mechanics, very similar to barefoot  
running. The idea is to eliminate the hard-heel strike and employ  
something closer to a mid-strike: landing softly on the heel but  
rolling immediately through the outside of your foot, then across the  
ball and pushing off with the toes, with a kind of figure-eight  
movement though the foot. There’s a more exaggerated version of this  
style of walking known as “fox-walking,” which is closer to tiptoeing  
and which has caught on with a small group of naturalists and barefoot  
hikers. Fox-walking involves landing on the outside of the ball of  
your foot, then slowly lowering the foot pad to feel for obstructions,  
then rolling through your toes and moving on. All of which is great,  
if you’re stalking prey with a handmade crossbow, or you’re an insane  
millionaire hunting humans as part of the Most Dangerous Game. As for  
walking in the city, fox-walking has no real practical application, in  
part because it’s incredibly frustrating to master and in part because  
you look like a lunatic.

Similarly, you may have heard of a shoe called MBT, or Masai Barefoot  
Technology, which was developed in the early nineties by a Swiss  
engineer after studying the barefoot walk of the Masai people. MBTs  
have gained a cult following because wearing the shoes forces you to  
work—and presumably tone—your leg muscles. I can attest that this part  
is true. After wearing MBTs for a short walk, you feel it in the backs  
of your legs. What you can’t feel—at all—is the ground. In an obvious  
irony, these “barefoot” shoes look like orthopedic shoes for  
Frankenstein. You stand on a rocker-shaped sole that’s designed to be  
soft and unstable. This improves your forward step but makes it nearly  
impossible to move laterally, i.e., slalom through slow-moving  
tourists in Soho. And a ride in MBTs on the herky-jerky D train feels  
like someone’s throwing an ankle-spraining party and you’re the guest  
of honor.

The Vivos are a totally different experience, since they’re as close  
to going barefoot in the city as you can get. Barefoot walking should  
be easy to master, in theory, and Clark assured me that I won’t need  
any special instruction. The first thing I noticed while wearing the  
Vivos is that each heel-strike on the pavement was painful. Soon,  
though, I naturally adjusted my stride to more of a mid-foot strike,  
so I was rolling flexibly through each step—but then I noticed my feet  
were getting really tired. My foot muscles weren’t used to working  
this hard.

After wearing the Barefoots for a while, though, I found I really  
liked them, precisely because you can feel the ground—you can tell if  
you’re walking on cobblestones, asphalt, a manhole, or a subway grate.  
(Striding along that nubby yellow warning strip on the subway platform  
feels like a foot massage.) Of course, it’s not often that you walk  
around New York, see something on the ground, and think, I wish I  
could feel that with my foot. But this kind of walking is a  
revelation. Not only does it change your step, but it changes your  
perceptions. As you stroll, your perception stops being so horizontal— 
i.e., confined more or less to eye level—and starts feeling vertical  
or, better yet, 360 degrees. You have a new sense of what’s all around  
you, including underneath.

Still, while I can accept that barefoot-walking is beneficial, it’s  
hard to shake off 30 years of wrapping my feet in foam. So I put this  
question—if bare feet are natural, why do we need shoes to “protect”  
the foot?—to a podiatrist at the Hospital for Special Surgery, who  
explained, “People who rely on the ‘caveman mentality’ are not taking  
into consideration that the average life span of a caveman was a heck  
of a lot shorter than the life span of a person today. The caveman  
didn’t live past age 30. Epidemiologically speaking, it’s been  
estimated that, by age 40, about 80 percent of the population has some  
muscular-skeletal foot or ankle problem. By age 50 to 55, that number  
can go up to 90 or 95 percent.” Ninety-five percent of us will develop  
foot or ankle problems? Yeesh. Those are discouraging numbers—but  
wait. Are we talking about 95 percent of the world population, or of  
North America? “Those are American figures,” he says. Which makes me  
think, North Americans have the most advanced shoes in the world, yet  
90 percent of us still develop problems? We’ve long assumed this means  
we need better shoes. Maybe it means we don’t need shoes at all.

Next: How we can stop taking walking for granted.

Let’s face it: I’m not going to walk barefoot in New York. Neither are  
you. We’re going to wear shoes. So even if shoes are the enemies of  
our feet, what have we really learned?

When I met with Amy Matthews, my standing-up-properly guru, I found  
out that, as a yoga teacher, she goes barefoot when she can, and the  
rest of the time she wears supportive shoes like Keens or Merrells.  
“The most important thing is to change up your shoes as much as  
possible,” she says. “And let your foot do the walking rather than  
your shoe do the walking.” Even Galahad Clark still makes and sells  
regular shoes along with Vivos because, as he says, there are a whole  
host of reasons people buy shoes, most of which have nothing to do  
with comfort. So weaning people—especially New Yorkers—off shoes is “a  
bit like trying to wean people off sex. It ain’t going to happen,” he  
says. “My girlfriend loves to put on heels at night. Then the next day  
she puts her Vivos back on, to recover.”

What you can do, though, is stop taking walking for granted and start  
thinking of it like any other physical activity: as something you can  
learn to do better. Don’t think of your feet as fleshy blocks to be  
bound up or noisy animals that need to be muzzled. (Oh, my barking  
dogs!) In one of the Rush Medical College knee-adduction experiments,  
barefoot walking yielded the lowest knee load, but a flat sneaker,  
like a pair of Pumas, also offered significantly less load than the  
overly padded walking shoes.

My new Vivo Barefoots aren’t perfect—they’re more or less useless in  
rain or snow, and they make me look like I’m off to dance in The  
Nutcracker. But when I don’t wear them now, I kind of miss them. Not  
because they’re supposedly making my feet healthier, but because they  
truly make walking more fun. It’s like driving a stick shift after  
years at the wheel of an automatic—you suddenly feel in control of an  
intricate machine, rather than coasting on cruise control. Now I  
better understand what Walt Whitman meant when he wrote (and I hate to  
quote another Transcendentalist, but they were serious walking  
enthusiasts): “The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred  
affections.”
It might be hard to imagine that the press of your foot to the New  
York pavement could yield anything other than pain or disgust. But if  
you free your mind, and your feet, you might find yourself strolling  
through a very different New York, the one Whitman rightly described  
as a city of “walks and joys.”