One step ahead: how walking opens new horizons
Whether it’s to the North Pole or across LA, walking is the fastest way to make more time for life
As a child growing up in 1970s Norway, with parents who didn’t own a car and loved to hike, Erling Kagge believes one of his first full sentences was: “How much further is it?”
By his late teens, though, he’d begun to embrace his parents’ ethos. “By then, for me, walking wasn’t just getting from A to B,” he says. “It had a value in itself.” So much so that at 27, he walked to the North Pole and, less than three years later, became the first person to walk to the South Pole alone – a 50-day trek with no radio. A year later he climber Everest. Now 25 years on, a father of three and the head of one of Norway’s biggest publishing houses, most of Kagge’s walking is closer to home. He walks two miles to his Oslo office each morning, hikes in the woods at weekends and has spent many evenings exploring every neighbourhood of his city on foot.