For those of you worried about the parking situation downtown, particularly during the upcoming Main Street redesign, the Capital Area Wellness Coalition has a great idea for a place to keep your car.
Your driveway.
Or maybe your office. Perhaps within inches of that jerk who parked across two spaces at the grocery store (that’ll teach him!) Your car’s exact location isn’t the point; the point is you don’t need it to enjoy everything that downtown Concord has to offer.
Skeptical? Then join the Capital Area Wellness Coalition and Mayor Jim Bouley for Concord’s first Mayor’s Walk, which will take place downtown Sept. 17 at 9 a.m. Walkers will gather at the Smile Building (49 S. Main St.) and stroll along a path toward the Centre Street intersection before crossing over and heading the other way on Main Street. The walk will finish at Bicentennial Square, where Bouley will make a few statements and a Healthy Living Fair will take place.
The entire walk is just about 1-mile long.
“What we’re trying to accomplish is reframing how easy it is to get around downtown, and how much fun it is,” said Wellness Coalition member and event organizer Johane Telgener. “In 10 minutes you can go from one end to the other. It’s much better than sitting at your desk cruising the internet. It’s much more fun to cruise Main Street.”
And until Carnival charters an actual ship to run through the middle of Concord (not proposed during the Main Street redesign, by the way), it’s the only way. Telgener makes it part of her daily routine already, taking breaks from the office to hold what she calls “walking meetings” with co-workers.
“I do that regularly,” Telgener said. “The key point is it gets you out, and you meet people on the street. I probably said hello to 10 people (on the last walk).”
Increasing the community’s awareness of and access to physical fitness is one of the Wellness Coalition’s main objectives, which sparked the “I prefer to walk” campaign with a focus on foot travel. That’s one of the reasons the walk is being introduced – to prove that you can easily work some movement and exercise into your day.
Wellness Coalition member Shawn LaFrance has worked with other towns throughout the state on similar walks in his role at the Foundation For Healthy Communities, and believes Concord is a perfect location for such an event.
“(It’s) something the coalition believes is very important. We hear in the long debate about whatever to do with fixing up Main Street about the parking issue, and this notion sometimes that if you’re going to CVS you have to be parked in front of CVS,” LaFrance said. “If people get out and walk around downtown, first of all they’ll see the charming historic architecture of our Main Street, and also realize that parking on Storrs Street or State Street or one of the garages and walking a couple of blocks is really a healthy activity, a way to build some health into your daily schedule. It’s a very walkable downtown.”
Diane Norris has certainly found that to be the case. When her department at Concord Hospital moved into the Smile Building a little more than a year ago, the southern New Hampshire resident said she felt like “a tourist every day” leaving the office for a lunch break. But she also knew her office job provided little opportunity for exercise during the day, and took to photography as a motivator to get outside.
“I decided to take photographs during my lunch walks and have my co-workers, most of who have lived in Concord or surrounding towns for most of their lives, try to guess where the pictures were taken,” Norris said. “It became a kind of game, and some of my co-workers took pictures, too, and we took turns guessing where the pictures were taken or what it was a picture of. Concord is a beautiful city and a pleasure for this amateur to capture photographs”
Telgener said the Coalition hopes the walk will become an annual event, and she said she’d be “thrilled if we had about 200 or 250” walkers for the first go-round. Both she and LaFrance said the Coalition wants to help educate people about the health benefits of walking downtown by providing things like counts of calories burned for walking certain times or distances and perhaps posting those facts in the future.
“I hope this is just the start of helping to raise awareness and sort of change people’s patterns,” LaFrance said. “We think there are ways to help people understand, like I walked x minutes or x amount of distance or (burned) x amount of calories walking from the parking garage at the Firehouse block over to Dos Amigos or something like that. They say you an adult should get 60 minutes of physical activity in a day, and you can walk (downtown) and have half your day’s physical activity done.”
Bouley will be leading the Sept. 17 walk, which will be held rain or shine (the Healthy Living Fair, which will feature exhibitors from some naturopathic clinics and the YMCA, among others, will be shine only). Telgener is hoping to see the neighbors she often passes during her walking meetings, but would be more excited to see some new faces taking advantage of the walkability of the downtown area.
“The thing that’s perfect about Concord is we are the right size to try something like this,” Telgener said. “The reality is it’s a great way to bring people together and create a sense of community. My hope is even for people who wouldn’t necessarily come downtown to say, ‘Wow, I can walk down there. It’s safe, there’s people that wave at you.’ It makes Main Street welcoming. There’s so much downtown. It’s right here.”
