WORLD-famous mountaineer CAMERON McNEISH is convinced that many of society’s health issues can be helped — by taking a simple stroll.
The 73-year-old author and broadcaster has tackled some of the world’s highest peaks, plus bagged all of Scotland’s 282 Munros three times over.
He has also been a TV regular, with programmes such as Wilderness Walks and The Adventure Show.
And Cameron has been joined on his travels by celebrity pals including Outlander star Sam Heughan.
Here, he urges Scots to pull on their boots and get trekking as May celebrates the annual National Walking Month, backed by the British Heart Foundation.
“LET’S go for a walk.”
Most people find taking a stroll a simple pastime.
But more books have been written on it than any other activity, suggesting there is more to it than meets the eye.
It’s something I’ve been doing professionally for over 40 years as a hill-walking/mountaineering writer and broadcaster.
I’ve witnessed the benefits, physical and mental, of the regular walking habit — none more so than in my own wife.
Some years ago, I took Gina on a trek to Nepal. For the best part of a month we hiked round the high passes of Manaslu and the Annapurnas.
And while the experience was highly memorable, Gina found it incredibly hard work.
At the time she was a bit overweight and short on fitness and one night, after a particularly exhausting day, she vowed she would never suffer like that again.
On our return home, she began to exercise on a regular basis and soon she was walking for an hour every day.
She lost two stone within a few months and, by the next spring, she was accompanying me on some fairly arduous overseas backpacking trips.
While she was delighted with her new shape and fitness levels, she also realised she’d changed in other ways.
She had become more positive in her outlook, more confident in herself and she felt more alert mentally.
In the few months of her new walking routine, she had not only improved her body shape, toned up her cardio-vascular system and strengthened her muscles, but those regular walks helped her to think more clearly and creatively.
She realised that when she walked, brain and body operated as one — and muscle use, followed by muscle relaxation, produced brain relaxation.
For your brain to function at its best, your body has to exercise.
And when we wander through forests, lochsides, sea shores, hills and mountains, a curious healing process takes place as we rediscover a natural world filled with adventure and alive with spirit.
I’m convinced such encounters with nature can reduce the stress in our lives simply because they speak to us of eternal values, things that have always been, as ancient as the duration of days.
All such encounters — the flight of a bird, the beauty of a sunset — are completely and utterly unplanned. None of it has been previously arranged or rehearsed by man.
And that, I believe, is the important issue. As the Harvard environmentalist EO Wilson once wrote: “Walking through green places, the green world, settles peace on the soul, because it is beyond man’s contrivance.”
A while back, I got a letter from a consultant psychologist at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
He told me that for years, doctors there have taken accident victims out into the countryside for a casual stroll, or left them to sit quietly for a while in a forest or beside a lake — and measured the stress levels just falling off them as they simply enjoyed the trees, the water and the song of the birds.
Many studies have illustrated the positive relationship between exposure to the natural world and wellbeing.
While nice views and pleasant countryside appeal to our sense of beauty, there are also chemical reactions happening in our body when we go for a walk that create a natural, drug-like effect in our brain.
A natural high, if you like, a glorious mix of adrenaline and endorphins that is as potent and addictive in its own way as a drug. And the wonderful thing about it is it’s free and easily accessible to everyone.
We all know the dreadful statistics that surround our Scottish race — heart attacks, strokes, coronary disease. We know of mental illness, stress, depression and suicide.
I’m convinced the simple and cheap solution to many of these is to go for a walk in the countryside.