EVERYBODY’S TALKIN’ ‘BOUT A NEW WAY OF WALKIN’ : Viisha Sedlak Is the Evangelist of Moving Fast While Always Keeping One Foot on the Ground
The sport of walking is like a nest of embellished boxes, each one more intricate than the last. The largest box is fitness walking, or power walking, or striding--moving with a normal gait at a faster-than-normal speed for a specified period several times a week. More than 31 million Americans are making power walking the nation’s biggest fitness sport. Open this box and find the racewalkers. Numbering in the thousands, these are the technicians of walk, the speedsters of stride, athletes whose sport is defined by the distinctive flex and drop of the hips and the straightness of the weight-bearing leg as the body passes over it. Crack the racewalking box and find the competitors and, within it, the elite competitors.
Just over a year ago, I determined to broach the second box and learn the technique of racewalking. I had reached the theoretical midpoint of a life spent avoiding unnecessary movement, and I felt a growing need to wave my fist in the face of mortality. For my single act of physical defiance, I chose to walk in the annual La Jolla Half Marathon, a 13.1-mile footrace over the swells of the old coast highway between Del Mar and La Jolla. Since then, my act of defiance has become a way of life. Unwittingly, I stumbled upon a sport where concentration matters as much as coordination, where years are an asset rather than a liability: They condition the one gift that can match, even surpass, an athlete’s muscle--the mind. By the time I crossed the finish line of that first race, ahead of scores of runners and all but one walker, the exhilaration of physical accomplishment had lured me into the fold of competitors and, perhaps inevitably, to Viisha Sedlak, full-time evangelist of the walking life.
Sedlak inhabits the center of the smallest box of walking. It is possible to racewalk in this country without hearing of Sedlak, but it is not easy. It is impossible, though, to compete seriously without marking her blond jet stream and endless legs. At 44, this seven-time member of the U.S. Track and Field Team and two-time Olympic trials qualifier competes with women young enough to be her children--and beats all but the very swiftest of them. At the masters level, for competitors over 35, she is the world’s top woman racewalker; she holds six world records and raced for six consecutive years without a defeat.
Unmarried, parent only to a spirited young Italian greyhound, Sedlak lives to walk and convert others to it. She trains (seven days a week, two times a day, 45 to 90 minutes a session), competes (in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Asia), coaches (Olympians and weekend walkers), teaches (weekly classes in Boulder, Colo., and at periodic clinics elsewhere), writes (articles, a book), makes videos and hawks walking. She once toured the nation’s malls promoting Easy Spirit walking shoes by striding in high heels for hours on treadmills.
“This a spiritual mission for me,” she says. “I feel like a doctor who can heal a broken arm. Racewalking offers people a way to live better lives. I have the ability to motivate almost anyone to walk better if they want to. When I am stressed by trying to compete, to hold my business together, to run my life, I think about walking away. But I can’t. I feel it would be irresponsible. The sport isn’t big enough. There aren’t enough people to coach it. There aren’t other middle-aged women role models that I could just walk away. I might want to, but not for long.”
RACEWALKING IS LIKE STRETCHING THE GAG about patting your head and simultaneously rubbing your stomach into a feature-length film. At her four-day clinics, Viisha Sedlak is the film’s director. Six months after my first race, I found myself traveling to one of Sedlak’s workshops in hopes of shaving more than a minute off my mile. On the simmering pavement behind a Scottsdale, Ariz., hotel, she pointed a video camera at me and ordered me to walk while she commented on tape.
“Doris! Your arms are too open. You want a 90-degree angle at that elbow . . . . Pull your chest up a little more and tuck your waist in a little more so your body is in a straight alignment . . . . Now lean but don’t bend your waist . . . . Let your hips flex behind you . . . but relax your hands, and when you pick your toe up behind you, don’t let it flip out . . . .”
The distinctive gait of racewalking seems new--not to say awkward and graceless--because Americans have so recently rediscovered it. When Sedlak formed the American Racewalk Assn. in 1988, to promote racewalking for exercise and competition, few Americans outside of the athletic community even knew the word. Yet, Europeans have racewalked since the 1800s, and the sport was popular here in the first half of the 20th Century. A men’s racewalking event was held in the 1906 Olympics and in most of the summer Games since.
Today, with the runners of the ‘60s and ‘70s aging, and fitness walking exploding, racewalking has entered the American mainstream. In 1992, a women’s racewalk event was at last incorporated into the summer Olympic Games (it had been a demonstration sport in 1988); local races, including the L.A. and Long Beach marathons, began including walk divisions with their own starting times and medals. American Racewalk now counts more than 3,000 members and associates, and hundreds of walkers from around the country have traveled to Sedlak’s Colorado base or to her out-of-town clinics to learn how to walk better or faster or how to become teachers themselves.
The sport’s progress, however, is of little comfort to a fledgling racewalker convulsing across the pavement to Sedlak’s admonitions and the unmistakable amusement of passing motorists. To the uninitiated, racewalking is distinguished from fitness walking only by the distinctive rotation of the hips. In reality, Sedlak instructs us, efficient racewalking follows a line from head to heel. Explaining, demonstrating, positioning, she aligns each of us, piece by piece: jaw slack, posture erect but relaxed, elbows crooked at a 90-degree angle, thumbs resting on fingers that are closed but not clinched, our bodies leaning forward from the ankles like shorts-clad Charlie Chaplins.
Once in position, she orders us to walk, flexing our hips forward and backward (instead of up and down), whipping thighs, straight knees, and feet forward until, toes raised, the heels plant firmly into the ground, initiating the next turnover. This is the first challenge: to synchronize all these motions. Next, we must synchronize them faster, never forgetting that failure to maintain a straight weight-bearing leg and one foot in contact with the ground will result in disqualification from a race.
Sedlak maintains that there is an athlete in each of us capable of mastering such convolutions. She also recognizes that, for most of us, there exists as well a sandy high school track where we ran dead last, a team captain who didn’t want us, a kid who called us “fatty” or “spaz,” a phys ed teacher who told us to stick with speech and drama. If we are women of a certain age, she knows that there are faint voices still whispering that sweat is unbecoming, that physical exertion can hurt us, that competition is unladylike.
After our morning workout, we retire to a hotel room for nearly two hours of mental workout to exorcise these and other negative images. After lunch, the lecture continues until we return to the pavement for another two-hour workout. Nearly 10 hours a day, for four days, we focus on walking, yet our attention rarely flags. Sedlak is mesmerizing--6 feet, 127 pounds, hipless, lineless, commanding. With an almost eerie beauty that comes from the juxtaposition of an oddly still face beneath a mass of electric hair, glacial eyes above a wry smile, she could be intimidating. Instead, she manages to convince us that she is, as we are--flawed, limited, with few native physical gifts, middle-aged, for heaven’s sake.
“I am not a natural athlete,” she insists. “I don’t have a lot of muscle. I don’t have a lot of lung. There’s nothing exceptional about my body. I have terrible eyesight. I’m no instant star in any sport I do. If anything my genetics are a little against me.” In the light of her unblinking revelations, our own failings fade, persuading us that we can be like her--fit, fast, formidable.
THE SEDLAK FAMILY WAS LONG ON INTELLECTUAL curiosity but short on emotional stability. Her mother drank. Her father was violent. A Navy officer on the Third World circuit, he typically moved the family every half-year. Viisha and three siblings grew up in a succession of island nations--Trinidad (then the British West Indies), Okinawa, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Guam and Chi Chi Jima, neighbor of better-known Iwo Jima. “We didn’t hang out American style,” she recalls. “We ate goat and slept on mats like everyone else.”
Formal education was hit-and-miss, sometimes in a base school, sometimes in a local school, sometimes shipboard traveling from assignment to assignment. Always, there were books or correspondence courses and, of course, everyday life. Altogether, it was enough to give her some mastery of seven languages and a National Merit Scholarship, which she used to enter UC Santa Barbara at the age of 16.
“I stayed one year. Not only was I a freshman, but I was a younger freshman. I was not in an emotional position to be a good student.” At 17, she dropped out and spaced out, gravitating like thousands of other teen-agers of the ‘60s to the Sunset Strip of Los Angeles and the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
“I was homeless. I didn’t own anything, I didn’t live anywhere. I collected bottles to raise 25 cents, because I could buy a meal of rice and beans for 25 cents. It wasn’t good, and it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that bad.” She wrote poetry, met Rod McKuen and the Grateful Dead and lived for a time next door to the house where the Jefferson Airplane was honing its sound.
Sometimes she went hungry. It was during one of those times that a clothing designer spotted her walking down the Strip and suggested that she consider modeling. “I was 6 feet tall and skinny and flat-chested, and he liked the way I walked. He gave me his card and told me to come by his factory.” Wary, she waited two weeks. Then, hungry and without a place to stay, she tracked down the address. “I didn’t have any clothes, any wardrobe, any cosmetics, but I was offered my first modeling job. I became a fitting model, a living mannequin.” Two years later, she was modeling on runways in New York, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, Mexico City and Los Angeles, and then she hit the print media. “There probably isn’t a couture designer whose clothes I haven’t worn, but I wasn’t a star,” she says. “I was just another working model.”
Her modeling career lasted 11 years, until she retired at 29, old by the profession’s standards. She had money, security, a house on La Cienega, but the modeling life is not the one she packs to a race today. It is her earlier life, the lonely and hungry years, that she says prepared her for her racing career.
“I don’t complain about my upbringing at all. I truly believe that hard times will either break you or make you really strong. Today, I don’t think there’s anyone out there racing that’s mentally tougher than I am. As the pain gets bigger, the inclination to slow down is more and more tempting. But the worse I hurt, the faster I go.”
After she left modeling and moved to Oahu, Hawaii, she began running to fight flab. Her first race was the Honolulu Marathon, and it hurt. Afterward, she was unable to step up a curb without assistance. “But I finished, and I was hooked--on the sense of accomplishment crossing the finish line, on the grief I went through getting there, on the self-esteem it gave. You know what else it was? I was impressed by the other people--by how good they looked, how good they felt. Right from the start, I wanted to be fast.”
She started to train a little, to run in local races and, occasionally, in national ones, and then she took up ultramarathoning, 50-miles-plus ordeals where her mental gifts could outdistance her competitors’ physical ones. At the same time, she resumed her college education, built a successful self-development and model-booking business and carried on a long-term romance.
It wasn’t enough. “Nobody local could beat me in the ultras, and I realized I’d have to leave Hawaii to be a competitive athlete. I wanted to see what I could be.” She was 33. “I thought that two, maybe three years of training would show what I could do. I thought I would commit myself to running for that period and then open my business again.”
She moved to Boulder, a mellow college town dwarfed by the sharp slabs of the Flatiron range. For the next four years, she ran, faster and faster until she ranked third among the world’s women ultramarathoners. “Suddenly, I found that people wanted me to teach them about running, fitness, nutrition and all the things my running had taught me.” As she built a business around her running, she sought tougher and tougher challenges, contests of determination as much as skill: Twice she entered a six-day event in LaRochelle, France, where the competitors lapped a track 23 hours out of each day to see who could cover the most miles.
Thinking that racewalking might provide her with a break from running during such grueling events, she asked some friends to demonstrate the technique to her while they were waiting for the start of a two-mile race in Boulder. Fifteen minutes later, she lined up for the start of the two-miler as a racewalker--and won. Ron Laird, a four-time Olympic racewalker and coach of the Olympic racewalking team, heard about her time and invited her to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, where he observed her and gave her some tips. The same year, her racewalking times won her a spot on the 10-member U.S. women’s national racewalk team and she gave up competitive running altogether to assemble the layers of her walking life--coaching, teaching, speaking, writing, promoting--and striving to set new world racewalking records.
“THIS IS NOT A BLOODLETTING SPORT,” SEDLAK is telling a ring of earnest faces. Several months after the Scottsdale clinic, I am in Boulder for a two-hour competition workshop with Sedlak. The members of this circle are typical--more women than men, more older than younger; a handful of serious competitors, a gaggle of neophytes. There is an Olympic qualifier with world-class ambitions and a grandmother with recurrent cancer, a mother of five who walks before her children wake up and a former marathoner beginning to give at the joints.
We are here for the usual reasons--to get fitter, thinner or faster, to opt out of running or into winning. One woman glances at her runner husband and quietly says she’s looking for a sport she can do with him, so they can spend more time together. The mother of five bubbles that “it just feels so good.” The grandmother plans to compete in next summer’s veterans’ games in Atlanta. Despite what Sedlak says, letting some figurative blood on the competitive trail is clearly foremost in several minds.
The workshop begins with the mental conditioning I now recognize as Sedlak’s trademark--admonitions about food, goals, recovery and attitude. Then we hit the track, lapping the tae kwon do kickers, rugby players and Renaissance dancers on the wooden infield, moving to Sedlak’s critical directions: “Relax your shoulders . . . . swing your arms backward, not forward . . . . Lean from your ankles and not your waist.” Occasionally, she pulls a walker over, corrects a prominent flaw, then releases her in order to isolate another. In the weeks that follow, these workouts will become more intense as Sedlak sets the pole higher, pushing her students through timed “intervals” at increasingly longer distances and faster speeds.
Again and again, she talks balance, urging tired walkers to take a day off, dieters to have the occasional splurge, competitors to give themselves a vacation. “Don’t do the same thing every day. Don’t even do the same thing every week. Set goals you can beat. There is no formula. There is no ‘should.’ ” This is another ingredient of Sedlak’s evangelistic success: She promotes fitness without misery, mastery without obsession. “Racewalking,” she says, “is for a lifetime.”
SINCE I WALKED MY FIRST RACE, I HAVE SEEN the results of time, effort and Sedlak’s training. I have established myself within the third of walking’s nest of boxes. I have raced through downtown San Diego and around the Colorado state Capitol, at sea level and at 9,000 feet, between ski resorts and through a zoo, where wolves greeted the day as I arrived. I have trained in heat, snow and hail, shaving a minute and a half from my initial per-mile pace, winning a trophy, a medal, even a turkey. In doing these things, I have found that chewing up miles without punishing my body feels good, and chewing them up fast feels even better. At 43, I realize that I can never occupy that fourth and smallest box containing the elite racewalkers, but still I wonder: Just how fast can I go?
In Scottsdale, Sedlak emphasized the need for athletes to talk to themselves, to affirm the positive and suppress the negative. “Make a list of affirmations,” she urged. “Don’t worry about being truthful. Write them down. Just before you fall asleep and as soon as you wake up, look at them. Plato said, ‘Act an attribute and it will be yours.’ ”
Now I tell myself I can finish a five- or 10-kilometer race in less-than-10-minute miles. Then I will break nine minutes, I will walk a marathon. I will win a medal doing it. I know I have limits but no longer know where they are. I know I will never be the best, but I can be my best. I tell myself I am an athlete, that I will accomplish these goals. Sedlak tells me the same.
I believe us both.