A Century in Motion: Grandma Kay's Walking Ritual

Her routine can aid in minimizing chronic disease leading to a longer, healthier life, says cardiologist.

👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson, author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the book’s origin story.) 🍇 The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life. It also includes stories of the Gemello Winery, which her late husband, Mario, ran for nearly half a century. 📖 I’m sure you’ll find my maternal grandparents are quite lovable characters. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button.

This newsletter is published twice a month on Mondays. Every third Monday features a story or tips on living a longer, higher-quality of life.

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Grandma Kay’s Walking Ritual

Grandma Kay, who had just turned 100, was confused over something I had said earlier in the day. It was a warm summer evening in 2021. We had just finished a walk in her neighborhood park.

Just after noon, I informed her researchers at the New England Centenarian Study read about her centenarian birthday celebration in her local newspaper and reached out, wanting her to join their study.

Over dinner that evening, she questioned the value she could bring to the study.

“Why do they want to interview me? I don’t do anything unusual,” she said.

“Grandma, you are a rarity,” I told her, explaining that she was among the one percent of the population that reaches her age. “The researchers feel they can learn from studying your genes and habits.”

She didn’t buy it. “I just go about my day, like a normal person,” she said.

Perhaps that daily 25-minute walk, pushing her walker through the park, may contribute to this, at least to a certain degree.

Another group of researchers at the University of Cambridge have found that a brisk walk - as little as 11 minutes per day - significantly lowered participants’ risks for heart disease, many kinds of cancer and mortality overall. In addition, those who did at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, which is similar to Grandma Kay’s longtime routine, slashed their risks of early death even more. 

“It’s really amazing the amount of benefits you get for a relatively minor effort,” said Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez in a New York Times article. He is the chair of the Division of Preventive Cardiology at the Mayo Clinic. He added that walking is one of the best forms of preventive medicine. 

Daily exercise, such as walking, improves the efficiency of your heart and lungs, which many cardiologists suggest are key to living a longer, higher-quality life.

Dr Paddy Barrett

, who shares longevity and preventive heart disease tips in his Substack newsletter, is one of them.

“A common refrain I hear is, ‘I have no interest in living longer if I do not have a good quality of life.’ However, one of the single biggest factors impacting your quality of life will be whether or not you have a major chronic disease,” he wrote in an April post titled, “Why Walking Might Save Your Life.”

“One of the single biggest factors impacting your quality of life will be whether or not you have a major chronic disease,” writes Dr. Paddy Barrett in his newsletter.

For a couple of decades leading up to Grandma Kay’s mid-nineties, she had a daily routine of burning off her dinner climbing the rolling hills in her Los Altos neighborhood. After knee surgery at 96, she traded the hills for flatter terrain at her nearby park. She had been doing the same half-mile loop almost daily until her 102nd birthday last June.

She’s always been a creature of habit. In the 1980s, a NordicTrack ski machine took up space in my grandparents’ family room. This was one of Grandma Kay’s forms of exercise. Grandpa Mario, her spouse of 64 years, was a hard laborer, working in his winery. He also played volleyball at the Elks Club. He would join her on after dinner walks if he wasn’t spent from the day’s activity.

As her 103rd birthday approaches on June 26th, she still tries to make it out to the park a couple times a week. Twenty-five minute walks, however, have become far less common this year. But she does get an energy boost from seeing the little kids running around on the playground or six-year-olds cycling past her as she pushes her walker to a comfortable park bench.  

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