Imaginary Walks Net Real Benefits : * Fitness: Novel wellness program for companies with little money for them shows remarkable results .

As the hike begins, the pre-dawn air is cool and moist with drizzle. The terrain, through state game lands, is flat until it drops sharply down a ridge to Schuylkill River near the town of Port Clinton, blanketed in morning fog.

Across the river, the climb steepens until the crest of the mountain ridge is reached. Then the trail becomes hilly, rolling up and down between 1,400 and 1,600 feet and passing rocky promontories like Pulpit Rock and the Pinnacle, where the sun already has burned off the mist and ribbons of farmland gleam spectacularly below.

For anybody familiar with the Appalachian Trail in Berks County, Pa., this description evokes immediate memories. For about 400 walkers--employees of Bethlehem Steel Corp.’s world headquarters and their families--the description is familiar, too. Never mind that as these people walked, many had a view of the gritty brick facades of Bethlehem’s South Side, or were trekking up the Main Street hill in front of the Hotel Bethlehem. In their mind’s eye, they were out in the wilderness.

Theirs was only a paper trail. Nonetheless, it was one that motivated the walkers to log more than 76,000 walking miles between April and June in a new kind of corporate fitness program. “Imaginary hiking” is the name of the concept developed by wellness consultant Denice Ferko-Adams of Coopersburg, Pa.

Imaginary hiking, Ferko-Adams said, motivates participants to exercise with more than just the promise of feeling better or losing weight. It also gives them an imaginary trip to an interesting or exotic locale through biweekly newsletter travelogues charting the sights participants would be passing if they were actually walking a specific route.

In the Bethlehem Steel program, the first route, tried last year, was through the company’s sprawling empire of steel plants. Walkers covered an imaginary route from Bethlehem to Sparrows Point, Md., Johnstown, Pa., Steelton, Pa., Burns Harbor, Ind., and Lackawanna, N.Y., strolling though a wire mill and watching as steel bars used in construction of bridges and buildings were made.

Last fall, Ferko-Adams devised an eight-week “Cruise the Lehigh Canal” walk from Jim Thorpe, Pa., to Easton, Pa. The most popular route so far, she said, was this year’s imaginary walk along the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Florida.

“My husband and I have walked a combined total of about 700 miles on the Appalachian Trail, so it was something I definitely knew something about,” Ferko-Adams said, noting she took some of her travelogue descriptions from her own hiking diaries and got others from library research.

“I always imagine people reading them the travelogues while they’re out walking,” she said. “The people who did read them really seemed to get hooked on it.”

According to Myrna Rivera, Bethlehem Steel’s employee benefits representative, many of the walking program’s participants walked every day on their lunch hours. To help them, the program provided maps of the main office’s neighborhood, showing one- and two-mile loops so walkers could keep track of their mileage, she said.

Also built into the program were special events, including an opening rally and concluding awards ceremonies with a random prize drawing for the 95% of participants who completed 60 to 120 miles during the 12-week program.

Many employees far surpassed the program’s mileage goals.

Ginny Guman, a planning department secretary who has worked for Bethlehem Steel since 1953, walked 615 miles in the 12 weeks. “I got involved because I felt at lunchtime, to go out and walk, it clears your mind. You come back and you feel refreshed,” she said.

In evaluations of the program, 52% reported losing weight, 40% said they felt better able to handle stress and had influenced family members to exercise, 16% lowered their cholesterol count and 19% reduced their blood pressure.

Martha Miller, a wellness consultant who has designed imaginary hiking programs for government workers in Hennepin County, Minn., said the programs fit the bill for organizations with scant resources to commit to employee wellness.

“We are a fairly large county with 10,000 employees and a very small wellness program, and we were trying to do something inexpensive,” she said. The walks she designed included a “Walk to Waterloo, Iowa,” playing on the idea of Napoleon’s march to Waterloo, and, most recently, a “Wild West Walk,” which sent participants on an imaginary hike on the Oregon Trail.

“The people who have done it loved it,” she said.