One of America’s First Spectator Sports Was Professional Walking

Walking needs no publicist. The simplest, most accessible form of exercise has been around since humans first foraged and traveled on the ground.

But today, walking seems to have entered its influencer era.

It’s been the subject of countless viral videos, of people doing it silently, collectively, for their mental health, for their physical health, for “hot girl” reasons and, yes, even for their gastrointestinal needs.

There’s something more to these micro-trends, though, than fitness personalities looking to make a quick buck off of brand-name water bottles or $30 socks. A new wave of fitness personalities—many of them women of color, of a variety of body types—seem to be reaching an audience who, due to numerous factors from safety to layers of systemic discrimination, have historically shied away from the leisure activity. This is exemplified by the explosion of walking groups in the United States in recent years, with headline after headline chronicling the rise of these meet-ups across the country, which has encouraged hundreds of strangers to come together each week to exercise.

This isn’t the first time a diverse group of influencers has widened the scope for walking. In the 1870s and 1880s, an unlikely assemblage of Americans became some of the nation’s earliest celebrities with the rise of the pedestrianism movement.

These professional walkers traversed hundreds of miles, around tracks and across state lines, to compete in one of the nation’s first spectator sports. Though the craze was short-lived, it left behind a legacy that challenges the stereotypical face of fitness to this day.

American pedestrianism began with a fateful bet: In 1860, the door-to-door bookseller Edward Payson Weston wagered a friend that Abraham Lincoln would lose the upcoming presidential election. Were Lincoln to win, Weston declared, he would walk the 478 miles from his home in Boston to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration—and he would do so in under ten days.

After Lincoln won, Weston set out to make good on his promise, publicizing his itinerary in local papers along the Eastern Seaboard. People waited for hours in the cold to watch him pass through their towns. A run-in with a debt collector left Weston 4 hours and 12 minutes short of his goal; Lincoln, who was following his progress along with the rest of the country, was still so impressed by the feat that he offered to pay the latecomer’s fare home. (The press-savvy Weston demurred, seemingly knowing that the refusal would only earn him more coverage.)

Following the Civil War, Weston took his walking show on the road. Thousands of spectators lined up to buy tickets and place bets on whether he could beat the clock. In a divided country, his walks were a unifying event. “He’s so apolitical, and I think that helped his popularity,” Matthew Algeo, the author of Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport, told me in an interview. “He could go anywhere and walk, and people wouldn’t object to it.”

Walking was not a popular form of exercise in the U.S. when Weston began staging his exhibitions, but he and the competitors who rose up to challenge him spread “pedestrian fever” among the public. “A Plea for Pedestrianism,” published in the New York Times in 1878, was a typical literary endorsement of leisure walking. The op-ed supplied readers with a sample walk they could take around Staten Island, recommended attire (“easy, yet stout laced boots with broad soles and low heels”), what to eat (“a sandwich and some hard-boiled eggs in your pockets”), and how to prepare (“Those who are not accustomed to much walking ought to practice it moderately during a week before marching a whole day in the country”).

Celebrity, long reserved for royals and political figures, was expanding—allowing pedestrians, or “peds,” to gain real influence as some of the country’s first mass-market stars. They used their platform to promote not just the sport, but also everything from shoe brands to trading cards. They even were the first to sell advertising space on their competition outfits.

One of the reasons pedestrianism resonated with so many, Algeo suggested, is that these athletes took an activity that was relatable—an “expression of the everyday”—and pushed it to the extreme. The result, he said, struck people as “personal,” “genuine” and “real.”

Professional walkers reflected an array of Americans, too. Because these walking matches were largely unregulated, there were no clear rules excluding certain groups from competition. One of Weston’s greatest rivals was Daniel O’Leary, an Irish immigrant who became “Champion Pedestrian of the World” in 1875 after defeating Weston in a six-day race. O’Leary took multiple athletes under his wing, including Frank Hart (born Fred Hichborn), a Haitian immigrant. Hart became one of the sport’s great stars and winner of the second-ever O’Leary Belt in 1880, where he earned more than $21,000 total, the equivalent of two-thirds of a million in today’s dollars.

Women “pedestriennes” also made a significant impact on the sport. At a time when conventional science held that strenuous athletic activity did lasting harm to female bodies, wiping them of their “vital energies” and their ability to reproduce, athletes like the Englishwoman Ada Anderson rose up as powerful counterexamples, showing what sportswomen were capable of.

“It is good for women to see how much a woman can endure,” Anderson told the New York Sun in 1878.

But there was a dark side to women’s pedestrianism. The sport was largely promoted and organized by men (including one of P.T. Barnum’s own public relations people). A majority of women came to professional walking out of desperation, to escape poverty or abusive relationships. Then they pushed their bodies to the limit. They did what men did—24-hour walks, 100-mile walks, six-day walks—but also attempted even more extreme stunts, like walking 3,000 quarter-miles over the course of 3,000 quarter-hours.

“This was a really tough life,” Harry Hall, author of The Pedestriennes, told me. Women walked in hard-soled shoes, he said, because saboteurs threw rocks, tacks and glass on their track, hoping to fix race outcomes.

The same laissez-faire setup that had allowed the sport to evolve so organically also led to it becoming synonymous with exploitation and scandal. Pedestrianism saw race fixing, early steroid use and an extortion attempt that ended with a manager’s suicide. With the rise of bicycle racing in the 1880s, the public moved on, leaving pedestrianism to fade into a historical footnote.

“There was no way pedestrianism was going to last forever,” said Algeo. “But it’s a shame it kind of killed itself.”

Today’s walking influencers have different aims and goals, not to mention more agency, than the stars of the sport a century and a half ago. But both walking waves can be seen as promoting “physical activity in spaces where they’re not traditionally or not as easily done in the past,” as Damon Swift, an exercise scholar at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, told me.

For those who are looking to hop on the trend today but aren’t ready to commit to a 10,000 daily step count—let alone a trek from Boston to Washington—you might find some wisdom in that 1878 Times trend story, which advised readers to “walk as long as [one] likes.”

Do just that, it promised, and you’ll return home “healthier” and “happier.”