Should I walk across the USA?

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momma said life is like a box of choclolates.............Show more

Walking is a great way to lose weight. I lost 60 pounds that way once. Plan your route carefully. Use a backpack with a mount or pocket for a water bottle. Put some emergency food in the backpack.

Take an extra pair of shoes in case the pair you're wearing has a blowout. Carry one change of clothes and be sure to wash the off set before the on set gets too dirty to wear. Carry a bar of soap, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste inside a little pastic toiletry kit.

If you're carrying money for motels everywhere, good luck on not getting ambushed and robbed. You will need some money, at least for emergencies. And to get back home if you decide you can't make it all the way and want to quit.

Alternatively, you could get a camping hammock from Hennessey, Clark or Speer - those are the best three brands. You tie them between two trees and snooze in the breeze. If it rains, there's a waterproof tarp that you can pull over the top and keep right on sleeping.

You might want to get a Coleman Peak 1 Apex camp stove. It weighs only a pound or so and burns unleaded gasoline. And get a thin, lightweight aluminum pot to cook your beans & rice soup in.

(Dry beans and dry rice, cooked in water with some salt makes a good hot trail food. Cook the beans first until done, add the rice to it later. A big pot of this stuff only has 720 calories.)

Take a gun with you. If you get jumped, shoot to kill. Take your chances in the courtroom with the jury.

If you're not a very in-shape walker, you might fantasize about walking 20 miles every day. But pardon me while I laugh. You can walk 20 miles in a day...once! After that your feet are going to be beat for the next three days (at least). You might had better start with 5 miles each day, which most people can do, until you toughen up enough for 10 mile walks. After a while, maybe you'll be ready for more.

Be sure that your hiking shoes are good enough, and fit well enough, for these long walks. A pain in the shoe is an annoyance for 1 mile, but it can nearly cripple you after five miles. The little bit of rubbing where the sock is thin might not seem like much at first, but it will hurt a lot once you're ten miles out of town.

For amusement during your walk, take a stopwatch and practice doing distance and speed math in your head. You might think, for example, that five miles per hour is "walking speed." Nope. Three MPH is the average walking speed. Two MPH is slow poking along. Four MPH is a fast walk that most people can't sustain for long. Only "Olympic Athlete" competition walkers can do that five miles per hour thing. If you're trying to lose weight, you probably aren't one of them....Show more

I can tell you from personal experience that it took me many months to walk from the geographical middle of Canada to the city of Toronto. I have never had much of a weight problem - I'm six foot tall and 150 pounds, so if anything I was a little underweight - but I wanted to really get the feel of the land.

I would recommend that you consider the project very carefully since it is a very difficult undertaking, but it would likely be very rewarding as well. The problems are mostly logistical, since the distances between towns and cities in the western USA are very large.

While in theory it should be possible to walk at a pace of 3.6 miles per hour for about 10 hours each day in reality I was only able to walk about 12 miles a day. The weight of a sixty pound backpack severely reduces the number of miles that can be walked per day, if you are trying to pace yourself to continue to do it every day for many months.

Good luck either way....Show more

Go for it! We have a man in this city that is 80 years old and he has walked thousands of miles in the last 6-7 years basically just to say he did it....Show more

I'll join you! Not to lose weight, but I've always wanted to walk across the US!...Show more