New Dementia Prevention

It's as old as time, but now it's also a proven way of stepping into brain health

Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

I used to be a runner. I started in seventh grade, when my English teacher, Mr. Gillard, urged me to join his Run for Fun club. At first I laughed. Me? Run? No way. But he was as persistent as I was oppositional, as in shape as I was sedentary, so just to shut him up I capitulated. Plus I lived in the suburbs, in a neighborhood without sidewalks. How else was I to get exercise as puberty loomed?

I was a terrible runner: slow, lumbering, prone to cramps and complaining, and one of the last students to finish, always. But it didn’t matter. Run for Fun was not a race. No one was timing me. And, as I discovered, my cramps and complaints decreased in direct correlation to the number of times I got out there. Plus while I never really became a fast or exuberant runner, once I forced myself to take that first step, I did enjoy moving through space, feeling safe in that community of classmates, getting exercise, and seeing the world without a car window between it and me. Was it fun? No. But it was fine, and it kicked me into a lifelong relationship with exercise for which I’m still grateful.

Then, right around my 40th birthday, my knee buckled under me during my third pregnancy, tearing my meniscus. And that was the end of running for fun, even after I had an operation to fix it. The risk of tearing it again—let alone having to undergo both surgery and recovery again—did not seem worth running’s benefits.

But I still wanted to find some form of daily aerobic movement, and I hated (still hate) gyms. So I found my daughter the puppy she’d always wanted and started walking. And walking. And walking! And what I noticed was that a vigorous daily walk was not only more enjoyable to my aging body than running, it had added benefits that running didn’t: my body grew lither, leaner; my brain felt clearer; my bum knee became sturdier. Moreover, ideas for stories and sentences came to me while walking, while problems in my writing could also be easily solved once I left my desk and hit the pavement.

Well, now, according to a new study in JAMA, I can add brain health and dementia reduction to my long list of walking’s benefits, within a now precisely mapped out step count.