Diary Of The Kansas City Hikers

Author : Jim Reisler
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 0803286422
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (32 download)

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Download or read book Walk of Ages written by Jim Reisler and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On his seventieth birthday in 1909, a slim man with a shock of white hair, a walrus mustache, and a spring in his step faced west from Park Row in Manhattan and started walking. By the time Edward Payson Weston was finished, he was in San Francisco, having trekked 3,895 miles in 104 days. Weston's first epic walk across America transcended sport. He was "everyman" in a stirring battle against the elements and exhaustion, tramping along at the pace of someone decades younger. Having long been America's greatest pedestrian, he was attempting the most ambitious and physically taxing walk of his career. He walked most of the way alone when the car that he hired to follow him kept breaking down, and he often had to rest without adequate food or shelter. That Weston made it is one of the truly great but forgotten sports feats of all time. Thanks in large part to his daily dispatches of his travails--from blizzards to intense heat, rutted roads, bad shoes, and illness--Weston's trek became a wonder of the ages and attracted international headlines to the sport called "pedestrianism." Aided by long-buried archival information, colorful biographical details, and Weston's diary entries, Walk of Ages is more than a book about a man going for a walk. It is an epic tale of beating the odds and a penetrating look at a vanished time in America.