KEEPING FIT : Off on the Right Foot : Tracy Hurd Teaches ‘Power Walking’ Both as Exercise and as a Way of Life

Tracy Hurd admits she gets some strange looks when she tells people what she does for a living.

She teaches walking.

But Hurd’s method isn’t just putting one foot in front of the other. She calls it power walking, which combines everything from traditional aerobics to the mannerisms of Groucho Marx. Four mornings a week--two in Laguna Beach, two in Dana Point--Hurd leads a group of power walkers through a comprehensive two-hour workout along some of the county’s most scenic paths.

A marathon runner who has been teaching fitness classes for a decade, Hurd taught running, not walking, until about 5 years ago.

“This woman who was about 70 pounds overweight showed up one day,” she recalls. “I liked this lady. She had guts. But I couldn’t put her in the running program, so I asked her, ‘How about walking?’ She started doing it, and soon she was bringing her friends, and I had a whole group.”

Hurd still runs on her own, but she has come to have more respect for walking after seeing what it has done for her students, and feeling its effects herself.

“People say to me, ‘Walking isn’t really a workout,’ ” she says. “But they’re wrong. When I do fitness walking, I get my heart rate up just as high. I never really thought it could compare to running, but it does.”

Hurd is hardly alone in her appreciation for walking.

“If you go out in the morning, you used to see tons of joggers, but now you see mostly walkers,” she says. “People are finally coming around to realize that you don’t have to kill yourself to get a good workout.

“Walking is one of those things that seems too good to be true. But it is. You can derive wonderful benefits from it.”

Each power walking session begins in an aerobics classroom, with warm-up stretches and some mat exercises to work on abdominals and other muscles that are not specifically addressed by walking. Then the class gets on its feet, heads out the door and walks for an hour, along the beach or up and down the seaside hills, before coming back inside for cool-down exercises.

Hurd also gives her students homework, recommending that they add fitness walking on their own at least two other days a week.

In class, Hurd offers tips on such fine points as stride, arm movement and posture.

“The energy from your stride comes off that push from the back foot,” she says. “People don’t realize, they think their stride comes from the front. Sometimes I get the class to work on that, exaggerating it to walk like Eddie Haskell (of TV’s “Leave It to Beaver”). And when we’re going up a hill, I try to get them to use the Groucho position, kind of crouched down, and use their arms to propel them up.”

The group tends to spread out as it moves along; the faster walkers surge ahead, with groups of two or three spaced out along the path. Unlike aerobics classes, in which conversation is somewhat inhibited both by the background music and the constant counting (“And 5, and 6--come on, you can do it! Breathe!”), fitness walking gives exercisers a chance to chat as they work out.

“That’s one thing about fitness walking class: Everybody gets to know each other,” Hurd says. “And they really form a support group. When someone’s cholesterol goes down, we all celebrate. It’s neat. And that socialization helps people come back to fitness.”

Although Hurd emphasizes that walking must be done briskly to make it a worthwhile aerobic workout, she teaches each student to find an individual stride and pace. “Some people take way too long of a stride, which forces them to kind of lean backward. Some take it a little too short, and that causes them to tire themselves out.”

Walking is perfect for “people who don’t think of themselves as athletic,” Hurd says. “And when you’re walking along the beach or someplace else that’s scenic, talking to your friends, it doesn’t even seem like exercise.”

Mary Gene Meagher, 68, of Laguna Beach certainly didn’t consider herself an athlete more than a year ago when she signed up for power walking. Even as a child, “I didn’t particularly like gym.”

She took long walks now and then but didn’t have a formalized fitness program. So when her doctor warned her that her cholesterol level was dangerously high, she decided to get serious about it.

“I’d read articles and seen things on television about how important it is to keep up a program of physical fitness,” she says, “But how many of us have the initiative to do it on our own? And the perseverance, and the discipline?”

Since then, Meagher says, “power walking has changed my life. I feel great, I’ve lost 14 pounds and my cholesterol is down 15 points. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in tights. But now they’re comfortable, and my legs aren’t flabby anymore.”

Martha Anderson, 48, of Laguna Beach just joined the class last week. “I’d been wanting to exercise for a long time,” she says, “but I was working for the last 10 years, and I didn’t really have the time. Now I do.

“I think exercise is kind of boring,” Anderson says, “but this is a fun way to do it. I had an absolute feeling of euphoria when I left the class the first day.”

Her goal is to “lose the standard 10 pounds that most people want to lose, to tone up and look good in a bathing suit this summer. I have a stationary bike that I ride at home, but it’s fun to get out in the open air.”