Robert Drewe: Walking backwards

I need a new physical-activity tracker. A what? The groovy smart-watch, bought to monitor my leg fitness after a second knee-replacement, has carked it under pressure.

According to the tracker I logged only 37 steps yesterday, but then in a burst of twinkling stars it congratulated me for trudging the equivalent of New Zealand’s length — both islands. Not bad going.

Last week it woke me at 4am to cheer me on reaching my walking target for the day. The smart-watch, whose brand I’ll keep quiet in case it’s my ineptitude causing its confusion, also promised, but then declined, to count my swimming strokes as steps.

A properly functioning fitness-tracker knows practically everything about you. It knows when you go to bed, and monitors your sleep patterns. It knows when you get up to go to the toilet and when you’re sleeplessly staring at the ceiling at 3am, pondering the world’s insanity, un-met deadlines, and your children’s employment prospects.

But what they mostly do is encourage you to walk more, at least 10,000 steps a day, and reward this with a burst of stars on your phone or computer. Sadly, you become emotionally dependent on these approving star showers.

After the second knee operation, when my limping from kitchen to lounge-room still logged a surprising number of steps, it seemed that attaining 10,000 on this subtle pedometer would be a snack, even on titanium knees.

Not exactly. My regular exercise is swimming, and that first day of step-counting I was surprised at how little walking on land I must have done all my life. My legs and feet seemed self-conscious, as if learning to go through these strange new motions.

But pathetically needy for approval from a machine, I rose early and accomplished the daily target. Then I limped to the coffee shop, reassembled my stiffening joints, and for good measure achieved the target again after lunch.

Congratulatory starbursts sparkled over my existence. How easy was traversing Argentina? And next morning the shooting pains in knees, ankles, hips and lower back prevented me from walking at all.

After a week recuperating back in the pool, and grumpily wondering why the tracker wouldn’t register my swimming strokes or my walking laps in the water, I turned to a favourite New Yorker article, the biography of a man who attempted to walk around the world backwards.

The famous Goon Show song, I’m Walking Backwards to Christmas, leapt to mind. But this was a true story. The Man Who Walked Backward, by Ben Montgomery, was about Plennie L. Wingo (real name), an American who back-walked for 18 months and 15,000km. Wingo made 10,000 steps and walking New Zealand fade into insignificance.

In the Depression, when such craziness as goldfish-swallowing, marathon-dancing and flagpole-sitting distracted a desperate America, the 35-year-old, 165cm Wingo had a brainwave. His restaurant in Abilene, Texas had gone under. So he embarked on an attention-grabbing and, he hoped, lucrative stunt: walking around the world backwards.

Wingo thought he’d cash in with endorsements, postcard sales and a book. The global publicity would be priceless. Equipped only with a walking stick and sunglasses with small rear-view mirrors, he set out from Fort Worth on April 15, 1931.

He made it backwards to Boston and then sailed for Hamburg. But after reverse-walking through Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, he was arrested at the Turkish border as a threat to public safety. “The police,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “couldn’t decide whether he was coming or going.”

Following his release from jail, the US consul convinced him to abandon his scheme. So Wingo settled for walking with his rearview specs across America.

By the time he’d traversed 17 States his musculature had become so reversed that his calves were at the front of his legs. Along the way, he amused onlookers by eating meals in reverse, beginning with dessert and finishing with soup.

While on the road, he made just $4, wore out 12 pairs of shoes and was divorced by his wife. Still footloose at age 80, however, he appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1976 and made $500 by walking 400 miles backwards to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum in Santa Monica.

Would Wingo’s backwards-walking have registered on Fitbit? Only if he swung his arms while doing so. Fitbit users say it’s the arm-swinging that counts as steps. So, in answer to your next question, any vertical or horizontal exercise should register. As long as you vigorously swing your arms throughout.

And it seems that walking backwards might be good for you. Wingo died in 1993, aged 98. It’s not clear if he was carried out feet first.