“Walking turns out to have had a heyday, at least as a competitive sport. That heyday came in the 19th century, when for the first time it was no longer something nearly everyone had to do. The sport was called pedestrianism, which was not then, Nicholson says, a synonym for the act of walking as it is now. Pedestrians walked on bets, they walked to set records, they walked for love. On a bet, the great pedestrian Capt. Robert Barclay Allardice walked a mile in each of a thousand successive hours, which means, as Nicholson points out, that he never got to rest for more than an hour and a half at a stretch for more than 40 days.”