United We Walk

U.S. Army lieutenant Susan Medlin was stationed in Augsburg, Germany, in 1984, the year before the Bavarian city’s 2,500th anniversary. As dry, warm winds descend-ed from the Alps, signaling the turn to spring, Medlin knew how she would spend her Saturday mornings: traveling with a group of fellow lieutenants to traditional volksmarching events.

A volksmarch—German for “march of the people”—is a 5K, 10K, or 20K walk designed for people of all ages and fitness levels. Flexible start windows and no finish-time requirements encourage people to walk together rather than compete against one another. Volksmarching allows the group to take pleasure in a shared journey of exploration and discovery.

Medlin and her friends saw the country this way, walking in Munich, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, and Adelsried. After each walk, there was a celebration: an oompah band, meat sizzling on a grill, and, of course, beer. Though most volksmarches were held in the warmer months, Medlin remembers driving with a friend to a winter walk on a cold December night.

“We were each given a lit torch—reeds bound and dipped in pitch, then set on fire,” Medlin recalls. “I felt very medieval tromping around in a snow-covered field with a lit torch. All we needed was a pitchfork, and we were ready to storm the castle!”

For many like Medlin, volksmarching is more than a hobby; it’s a lifestyle. Veteran volksmarchers plan vacations based on states they haven’t walked in. They’ve filled gold event record books and yellow distance record books, and they’ve covered T-shirts and jackets in achievement patches for events participated in and distance walked. Volksmarchers skew slightly more female than male, most are over 50, and many are still walking well into their 70s and 80s. Even those in their 90s, who can no longer walk long distances, volunteer at checkpoints and finish tables, ready to share a coffee and a chat. For those who have been volksmarching the longest, the sport has cemented decades-long friendships, satisfied a post-retirement call to purpose, and kept them healthy and connected in a time of extreme anxiety and isolation. And it all started stateside in Texas.

“We joke that we’re America’s best kept secret,” says Medlin, now a San Antonio resident and vice-chair of the American Volkssport Association (AVA), a nonprofit headquartered in San Antonio that hosts volksmarching events throughout the country.

One of Medlin’s biggest regrets is the 20-year break she took from volksmarching after she and her husband, an Air Force officer, returned to the U.S. from Germany. In 2010, while stationed in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Medlin saw an advertisement in the paper for an April volksmarch in the Garden of the Gods, a park accented with sandstone formations. “Darren,” she said to her husband, “let’s do this.” They dug out their old distance and event record books and never looked back.

Several years later, when the Army relocated Medlin and her husband to San Antonio, she joined the Randolph Roadrunners Volkssport Club, one of a half-dozen volkssport groups in the area. Eventually, she volunteered to serve as the club’s vice president. These duties dovetail with her role at the AVA, as well as serving as president of the Texas Trail Roundup. The latter is responsible for a three-day international event that takes place in San Antonio every February.

On a Saturday morning in early December, I meet Medlin in front of St. John Lutheran Church in Boerne for a traditional volksmarching event hosted by the Randolph Roadrunners. Medlin greets me wearing a sequined Santa hat, as promised. A banner strung through a low hedge reads START in bold red letters. At a traditional event, which is staffed by volunteers like Medlin, walkers can start at any time within a wide window—say from 8 a.m. to noon—if they plan to finish no later than three hours after the start window closes. Most routes take two hours to complete at a leisurely pace.

It’s 10 a.m., and despite the generous start window, most of the 80 or so walkers who have signed in so far are either finished or on the trail. Medlin ushers me inside Luther Hall, a community area where a half-dozen volunteers in green Randolph Roadrunners polo shirts make easy, friendly conversation. The air smells like remnants of the free pancake breakfast offered to event participants. Like the first volksmarches Medlin attended in Germany, many traditional events include a social component like breakfast or lunch. Lingering is encouraged, and finishers arrive through the doors flushed and exhilarated.

“Great walk,” one woman tells Ellen Ott, president of the Randolph Roadrunners, before helping herself to coffee. Ott discovered volksmarching in 1984, when she worked as a nurse in the operating room of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Virginia. A fellow Army nurse had recently returned from Germany and talked Ott and a third nurse, Linda Goodman, into walking with her.

Volksmarching events are classified as either traditional events, such as the Boerne walk, or year-round events (YREs). Both are planned by local volkssport clubs, designed around points of interest, but YREs are not staffed. Instead, from dawn to dusk most days, walkers can find a “walk box”—usually a portable file box—at participating Starbucks, convenience stores, or parks. The box contains a registration log, a printed map, directions for the walk, and an envelope in which to mail $3 to the local volkssport club sponsoring the YRE. Participants don’t need to be members of any volkssport club, but if they are, they can bring their distance and event record books and stamp them with the IVV certification stamp located in the walk box.

“That first walk was in a state park in Virginia,” Goodman says. “It must have been a year-round event because I picture us all together but no other walkers around. It was around the fall, really gorgeous. We relaxed and talked and solved the world’s problems.”

Both Goodman and Ott were hooked. Goodman is now working on 35,000 kilometers and 3,000 events and has walked in every state except Hawaii.

“I have friends all over the United States and really close ones here in San Antonio who I would not have necessarily been introduced to other than meeting on walks,” Goodman says.

Ott became involved with the Randolph Roadrunners in 1990, 10 years after its founding, and finally retired her distance book at 26,000 kilometers. “I was sick of keeping track,” Ott says. But she maintains meticulously organized records of each event she walks. Her numerous patches are sheathed in plastic sleeves she found at Dollar Tree, ideal, she tells me, for how they open at the sides rather than the top. She’s currently working on her second “A to Z Walk”—an AVA special program that includes walking in cities beginning with each letter of the alphabet.

“For Y, we went to Yoakum,” Ott says. “There was only one restaurant that was open, and they ran out of barbecue because we had 100 people there trying to get their Y.”

Near the double doors, Ott shows me an informational table bearing pamphlets and maps of additional AVA special programs—themed events that might include walking by carousels or ice cream parlors, Civil War battlegrounds or Little Free Libraries. Ott is organizing Walk Texas, a year-round event that involves walking in all seven regions of the state: Panhandle Plains, Prairies and Lakes, Piney Woods, Hill Country, Big Bend, South Texas Plains, and Gulf Coast.

In March 2020, the pandemic put a temporary pause on business as usual for volksmarchers.

“There was that initial stunned period where you were afraid to leave your house,” Medlin recalls. So, Medlin built a walk box, got it sanctioned by the AVA, and left it on her front porch for anyone who wanted to walk her neighborhood as a YRE. She walked her own route 100 times that summer, but the day she made it a featured walk for the club, 40 to 50 people arrived on her doorstep.

“We couldn’t stand to not see each other,” Medlin says.

After six weeks of isolation, volksmarchers began cautiously walking together again. Turns out volksmarching might be the ideal pandemic pastime. Walking has profound health benefits, from improving mood and cognition to preventing or managing heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. A study published on nature.com in June 2021 used mobility data from mobile devices as well as area-level data to examine the walking patterns of 1.62 million users across 10 major U.S. cities before and after 2020 lockdowns. The results showed utilitarian walks (to work, for example) decreased, while recreational walks (Sunday afternoon strolls) increased, at least in higher-income areas. One of the study’s conclusions is that equal opportunities to support walking are needed in lower-income areas. Also, a survey from the shoe brand Rockport found 53% of Americans are walking 1 to 5 miles more each day than before the pandemic.

“An active walker is a healthier person,” Medlin says.