WALKING TALL

Professional walking - walking for money, that is, for prize money or gambling purposes - had a relatively short span of popularity during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and is little known today. One of its legacies, I suppose, is the manner of walking (heel and toe, I believe they used to call it) sometimes seen in the Olympic Games. But it was a thrilling spectacle in its day - as endurance dancing was during the American Depression years - so much so that at Newmarket the course for one such contest was floodlit and crowds turned up night and day.
Some of the challenges were formidable and harked back to Classical times. Philonides, the runner of Alexander the Great, is said to have covered 1,200 stadia (a stadia was about 184 metres) from Sicyone to Ellis; while during the reign of Nero a nine-year-old boy is said to have run 75,000 paces between noon and night. Nearer home, one Robert Bartley, who was born about 1719 and may have come from Norfolk, frequently walked from Thetford to London in a single day; while in 1787 a pedestrian from Hampshire, named Reed, walked 100 miles in a day.
These were endurance tests for reward, of course, but a chap named Foster Powell, a Yorkshireman, did it for betting money. In 1773 he walked from London to York and back again in six days for a wager of 100 guineas; and in September, 1787, he walked from the Falstaff Inn, Canterbury, to London Bridge and back in ten minutes less than 24 hours, a distance of 109 miles.
Much of the information for this comes from a book with one of the longest titles I have ever come across (see below), and which is one of my prized possessions. Walter Thom's account of the history of pedestrianism, as the sport was called, was combined with his account of the walking career of perhaps the greatest pedestrian of them all, an Army officer named Capt Robert Barclay Allardice, otherwise Capt Barclay. And some of his pedestrian achievements were mindblowing.
Early in his career, Barclay walked 64 miles in 12 hours, and a year later, in 1800, was taking wagers that he could cover 90 miles in 21 and a half hours. I should add here that the wagers, and the contests, were organised and overseen by chosen officials, because it was such a big business. The top pedestrians trained hard, too, and fascinatingly, Mr Thom devotes a big slab of his book to some of Barclay's training routines.
Barclay's career reached a peak when he was challenged to go 1,000 miles in 1,000 successive hours, at a rate of a mile and a half in each and every hour, throughout the night and day, to be performed on Newmarket Heath beginning in June, 1809. The wager was 1,000 guineas. There was a frenzy of betting, and so high was public excitement that not a bed was to be had in either Newmarket or Cambridge. Some fans even watched the night-time sessions, and lights were erected for their benefit.
This extraordinary feat of endurance was successfully concluded on July 12th, watched by thousands of spectators. Barclay covered the very last mile on the 42nd day in 22 minutes, having walked the 1,000 miles in 296 hours at a rate of just over 81 miles every 24 hours. Five days after he finished the challenge, the Army sent him to Ramsgate where he joined a military expedition to Walcheren.
Original 1813 copies of Walter Thom's book are very hard to find, rare even, but I have one, newly bound, and I treasure it.
(Pedestrianism; or An Account of the Performances of Celebrated Pedestrians during the Last and Present Century; with a Full Narrative of Captain Barclay's Public and Private Matches; and an essay on Training. By Walter Thom. Printed by Chalmers of Aberdeen for various publishers; 1813. And The Celebrated Captain Barclay, by Peter Radford, Headline, 2001).