Some healthy competition

A few weeks ago, the NYTimes magazine focused an issue on walking around NYC (April 23, 2015). Contributors shared some favorite city walks, while other articles explored how NYC pedestrians and cars co-exist, and how much distance urban rats actually cover in their scurrying about the Big Apple.  A small collection of human New Yorkers were given fitness trackers to reflect the distance they cover on foot each day (see Sweeney, Camille. "City of 10,000 steps.").  Their short profiles in the paper edition of the magazine indicated how much of the walkers' daily walking distance was achieved often just by getting to and around work.  I found myself wistfully remembering my similarly pedestrian existence in Aix-en-Provence, France, where most of my errands were on foot, and even getting to the (single) family car required a walk down three flights of stairs and across a city block.  I didn't have to plan to walk, walking just happened.  Sometimes the walking was exhausting but overall walking everywhere enriched the social experience of getting to know a city and its people and customs (and it seemed to be good for my physical fitness too).

Back in the States, I am finding that more and more, I have to create reasons to walk and places to walk to because my daily life is so chair-bound as a professor or car-bound as my children's chauffeur.  The services that I need regularly are also no longer difficult to access without a car. I shop online, I renew licenses and turn in paperwork online.  A walk to the post office has become rare.  This hearkens back to the assertion made in a Slate magazine article several years ago, that walking has been engineered out of existence (see Vanderbilt, Tom. "The Crisis in American Walking, April 2012; I cited this in an earlier post on walking in France, A pied April 2012).  Indeed, without my standing date to walk for an hour with a friend several mornings a week, and occasional spontaneous walks, I am fairly inactive in comparison to my life in France or even to my life in Seattle a few years earlier when I walked my kids to elementary school every day.  In my current situation, I simply don't need to exert myself to accomplish daily life.  Unfortunately, this appears to be detrimental to my waistline (as others have also experienced).  Clever people at Northwest companies like Synapse, Nike, Microsoft must have seen this coming, because they have been hard at work at reconceptualizing walking, or re-engineering it, into a game-like activity, rather like a leisure sport. Now we can wear fitness trackers on our bodies--the currently popular ones are wrist bands--and try to meet daily goals (10,000 steps or about 4.5 miles is the goal on the Fitbit tracker, the one I took over from my spouse a few months ago).  Progress can be tracked by looking at the number of blinking lights on the wristband, or by checking the actual number of steps on a smartphone that is hooked up to the tracker by Bluetooth connection.  A strangely satisfying sustained vibration on the wristband indicates when the target has been met.  That alone is somehow motivating; NYC walker Chang who tried out the Fitbit for a week reported that she'd stand in her living room and do jumping jacks if she hadn't hit her 10,000 steps by the end of her day (see Sweeney above), and I've seen a funny picture on Facebook of my cousin's motivated wife going up and down the steps in her home one evening in an effort to meet her step goal.  My neighbor and I have been known to pop out together for a quick 350 step walk to meet our daily goals.  To appeal to Boy or Girl Scout types, some fitness trackers proffer digital badges and accolades when particular cumulative distances have been covered, while competitive types can share their distances on Facebook or become Fitbit friends, tracking and competing with each other via their smartphones. These same friends might even try to one-up each other by sporting the best Fitbit bling, or jewelry attached to the relatively ugly rubber wristbands. Designer Fitbit bling is available at Nordstrom, while less expensive alternatives can be found on Etsy: see mine below.

What makes this sociological?  For one, approaching the act of walking this way, as something that we do for fun (okay, maybe to achieve a relatively difficult to measure outcome--better health), and that is to be tracked, with the goal of the more, the better, is definitely a reflection of our time and of relative privilege.  It seems unlikely that our ancestors would understand why our fitness goals are to take as many steps as possible, when reducing the number of steps it would take to get somewhere or to accomplish some task has been a major goal for much of human history.  People in our society and outside it who are without access to good, reliable transportation, who must rely on a great deal of legwork each day, are also not likely to appreciate the attractions of counting daily steps for fitness. They may also not understand how fairly worthless markers like blinking lights and flashing digital badges are motivating.  They might better understand the motivation derived from competing with one's self or with other people, but even this motivation appears to be fairly flimsy, dependent on battery life. A friend and I have both admitted giving up on walking for the rest of the day on occasions when our fitness tracker batteries have run out!  We seem to have reached a point where we just don't see the point of continuing, if our steps aren't going to count towards our daily total.  I'm not sure what that says about me, but I'll ponder it as I work on my step totals over this long Memorial Day weekend, on a fresh battery charge.

Les boules de neige

Like boules de neige (snowballs) that get bigger and denser the more snow you pack into them, the ski resorts in France are getting more and more crowded in this second week of les vacances scolaires (school holidays). French school 'districts' are divided into three zones (Aix schools fall into zone B), and the school winter and spring holidays are staggered by zone so that holiday locales can adequately meet the domestic demand for accommodations and space. Each year a different zone begins the holiday cycle; last year zone B had the last winter and spring holidays, occurring in mid-March and early May, respectively, while this year zone B starts off the cycle. Unfortunately, we could not get away the first week, so our zone B family's stay at a little 10-room hotel aptly called La boule de neige, in the ski resort at Serre Chevalier, near Briançon, overlaps with a zone A family's, from Lyon. (The Parisians of zone C arrive one week later by which time our kids will be back in school.)

The crowding and the scheduling of the family ski day seems to be especially attuned to mealtimes, which is of course especially French (even if not all that different from family ski days at resorts in other parts of the world). Ski lifts open at 9 here in the southern Alps, and the télésiège (chairlift) and télécabine (gondola) lines are heavy by 10:30, after the leisurely petit déjeuners (breakfasts) with chocolat chauds (hot chocolates) and croissants have been eaten. The activity on the slopes quiets down considerably during the sacrosanct midday mealtime (except at the mountain and village restaurants!), and then again, after 5 pm, when one begins to see bunches of baguettes under the arms of ski parkas in the village. By this time, the last chairlifts stop running and families prepare for goûters and apéros (snacks and cocktails), before the evening meal around 7 or 8 pm.

Interestingly, we've met several adults without kids, French and foreigners alike, who are or were vacationing here at this same time as all of these French families with schoolchildren. If I were an avid skier and a parent without children at home (I am neither), I think I would avoid this particularly crowded time. One would think the accommodations would be cheaper and more widely available, and the village less boisterous (there's a carousel and marching band in ours, and a Wednesday evening super-spectacle complete with torch-bearing skiers and a fireworks display!), while the lines would be virtually non-existent and the snow would be as good and powdery even a few weeks on either side of the school holidays. We were in the Haute Savoie last Easter, outside of the school holiday times and had good snow, very short chairlift lines, and lots of fin de saison (end of ski season) sales on ski gear. (I mentioned this trip in a post in April 2012 called Département 13.). I'm sure the local hotel and restaurant proprietors appreciate the extended and less frenetic holiday times, but for many guests, I suppose part of the charm of alpine skiing is the lively aprés-ski scene. Without the hustle and bustle of vacationing families in the villages, the excitement and energy of the social environment after skiing is likely much lower, weaker, or might we say, softer, just like snowballs made of snow too early or too late in the season.

Manger ~ bouger

The French may not be as 'sporty' as Americans and northern Europeans, but they seem as likely as the rest to use the new year as a catalyst for getting one's body and physical fitness in order (like one tries do with one's living spaces too, see my previous post, Faire le ménage).  Despite the worldwide attention that rich, delicious French cuisine gets, and the popularity of books that tell us that French women don't get fat, obesity is in fact a growing healthcare problem here as it is elsewhere in the West.  A recent interview in Paris Match with the Health minister Marisol Touraine highlights this fact (Chavelet, Nov. 12 2012. "Marisol Touraine fait monter la température." Paris Match ) as does the revelation in the New York Times Magazine that weight-management company Jenny Craig is alive and well in France (see Dominus, June 2012. "French Women Worry About Getting Fat, Too, The NY Times").  The French obesity rate is half of that in the U.S., but within France, it has doubled in about 15 years.  This tells us that the French are no different than citoyens (citizens) of any other post-industrialized society where the standards of living are comfortable and most people eat enough, but where as a consequence of this 'plenty', the food choices and physical activity do not always balance each other out. Obesity is an epidemic health condition in well-to-do societies.

The French get their taste for sugar early on.  The normal gôuter (the small snack for kids after school) as I've seen it here in the south is often pain au chocolate (either a factory-made soft roll with chocolate which the grocery stores stock in large quantities, or if you're lucky, a fresh bakery-made flaky croissant with chocolate--it's small, but it's sweet).  My own kids marvel at some of their classmates' obsessions with candy and soda, and the food young rugby and soccer players eat between and after matches at tournaments is astonishingly junky.  It's a lot of sugar and carbohydrates and fat.  The upside is that these foods are generally not made with high fructose corn syrup, like in the U.S. (even the soda tastes different here), but sugar isn't exactly good for you either, nor is the processing of natural ingredients into food products like Nutella (the hazelnut chocolate spread, which one of my sons really likes).  In November, the government began pursuing a Nutella-tax, on palm oil, as one way to reduce the consumption of saturated fat-laden foods in France. 

One response to the concerns about the deteriorating physical conditioning of the French is a public health campaign similar to the American Let's Move initiative led by U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama.  The French version is called  Manger Bouger and the goals are: bien manger (to eat healthfully) and bouger plus (to move more).   Living in a relatively temperate climate in the south of France, it's easy to bouger, even though it took a while to discover where people exercise and what they do.  This is not a country of large-scale, 24-hour health clubs as my spouse discovered (some are even closed on the weekends and evenings!).  But if I get up early enough on a weekday, or take a late weekend afternoon walk, I see Aixois going for jogs or walks around town or in one larger city park with running trails.  Every time we've gone for a swim, the lap lanes at the city pool near us have been crowded.  More recently I've discovered the popular randonée (hiking).  The parking lots at trailheads in Provence are frequently crowded in the afternoons and on the weekends, and there are people of all shapes and backgrounds hiking.  Numerous hiking clubs around the area also organize weekly or monthly hikes at the calanques on the coast or in the rocky fortresses and canyons further inland. Luckily for me, a Finnish friend and I have formed a casual hiking club of two, and we have walked near the dams that supply drinking water in our area, and below, I'm pictured on a trail near the base of Aix's rocky Mount Sainte Victoire.  It's only during the summer that hiking is difficult as the trails are opened for limited times due to the very dry conditions, the heat, and the fire danger.  By that time, I suppose, we should all have mangé'd and bougé'd enough to get ourselves in shape for the beach or the pool, the only really comfortable places to hang out during the broiling summer months.