COVID-19 compelled those of us lucky enough to live here out into the streets. For many residents, it was the first time they were home during the day to enjoy the neighborhood. For Wilshire Park resident and world class athlete Diana Nyad, it just confirmed her belief that LA can be a walkable city. We are thrilled to share with Buzz readers Nyad’s essay about the national walking movement she started right here at home.Â
I’ll admit it. I came kicking and screaming to Los Angeles from New York, lamenting the dearth of wild and zany characters one encounters hour by hour in the Big Apple. In any huge metropolis, magnified in NYC, you can walk day and night among strangers, usually sparking at least three or four unexpected and interesting conversations daily.
When first here, I would stand on street corners, searching for the eighteen million people who live here, thirsting for an impromptu passionate or at the very least humorous exchange about politics or sports or a current cultural event.
So it took me a while to accept that we are in fact living in a sprawling suburb, as opposed to the vital urban madness of London or Paris or Tokyo. Then I moved to the Larchmont area. OK, let’s not pretend that the charming strip of a few tame streets can replace the wide diversity of every New York City block. But, at long last, I had a walking neighborhood, instead of a solitary driving milieu.
Suddenly, and very happily, I was walking my dogs to Larchmont, never tiring of the grand architecture of the 1920s throughout Hancock Park, the wonderful grandeur of the trees, especially the maples turning orange and red in October. Now I was making friends with merchants who would forgive me forgetting my wallet and let me pay the next time. Unusual for the L.A. lifestyle, I was now walking from the news stand to the coffee house to the bank to the juice bar to the gift shop to the pharmacy to the hardware store (oh please, oh please, bring back the hardware store). The unsatisfying driving, one by one, to each of these errands was joyously over. I could be a walker in this town, thanks to Larchmont. This is when I stopped doing the New Yorker apology thing for Los Angeles.
Then in 2016 my Cuba Swim expedition leader, Bonnie Stoll, who moved out to LA with me, and I founded a national walking movement, EverWalk. That’s when Bonnie and I truly discovered L.A. It’s amazing how you can live on a street for years, you can pass a neighbor’s house for years, but when you were driving you never seemed to notice the adorable robin’s egg blue wooden lending library perched in one of their trees. As walkers, Bonnie and I delighted in all the sights to which we had been oblivious. The details of the orange and lemon trees, the owls and hawks nesting tree by tree, the masterful masonry leading up to each front door. We seemed to circuitously make our way to Larchmont from our house, discovering an infinite number of eye-candy routes.
That same year, 2016, EverWalk hosted our first of what we call our EPIC walks. We go 134 miles in seven days, about 20 miles per day. So far, our group of walkers from all over the country have traveled by foot from Los Angeles to San Diego, Boston to Maine, the Canadian border to Seattle, and Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. In training for these long walks, I developed a 14-miler, from my home winding my way up to the Griffith Observatory and then down to the flats again, some mocha delight at Larchmont always the finish-line carrot dangling in my imagination. Those last few blocks, with the buzz and color of Larchmont coming into view, were a wonderful lift.
But the ultimate of walking life in L.A. has come with Covid. Since March 2020, I have never seen so many people walking in the neighborhoods all over the city. I’m embarrassed to say that this is the first time I’ve really gotten to know who my neighbors are, for many blocks to every side of my house. It’s the only outdoor freedom many of us have had and we many of us seem to have taken advantage of it, also taking advantage of the spectacular winters here, able to see snow crystals on the San Bernadino Mountains to the east on these clear days.
All of us wearing our masks, keeping our safe distances, we are walking our dogs more than once a day. We’re taking our kids for a stroll before dinner. We’re chatting from across the street, getting to know each other for the first time.
We at EverWalk have just started our first walking program with the LA Unified School District. We do tend to think big, Bonnie and I. We call our program The EverWalk Mile, the concept being that kids will make a habit of walking one mile every single day, same as they make a habit of brushing their teeth every day. We have a vision of generations of kids and their families here in Los Angeles making a lifelong habit of their daily Mile. What if we literally changed Los Angeles from a car culture to a walking culture? And those of us lucky enough to live near Larchmont are already leaders in that cultural shift.
Diana Nyad is the only person ever to swim the 111 miles between Havana, Cuba, and Florida. Nyad is an award-winning public speaker, sports broadcaster and author; her memoir “Find a Way” is her most recent book. Her stage play “The Swimmer,” which she performed off-Broadway in 2019, is next scheduled for The Geffen Playhouse here in Los Angeles. Recently it was announced that Nyad’s book will become a film with actress Annette Benning playing the leading role.
