Nordic walking

[sunny1011]

Interessant aus dem Hesari (werde kürzlich zusammenfassen, erstmal auf Englisch):

When Finland "Nordic walked" itself onto the world map
Nineteen years ago, Southern Finland was snowless. It led indirectly to the invention of a form of exercise that has seven million fans and has already spread as far as Australia.

By Ilkka Mattila

The early weeks of 1988 saw Helsinki experiencing a winter just as drear and depressing as this year. There was no snow to be seen, the temperature hovered just above freezing, and rain belted down from a leaden grey sky.
January 5th of that year marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of a Finnish sports icon, Prof. Lauri "Tahko" Pihkala, and it was planned that the event should be marked by the unveiling of a statue of the great man in a small park close to Helsinki's Olympic Stadium.
Aside from being the brains behind Finland's national summer sport of pesäpallo or Finnish-rules baseball, the founder of the nation's system of sports institutes, and the inventor of several other sports, Tahko Pihkala was known as a diehard advocate of cross-country skiing for all.
Hence Suomen Latu (the rather cumbersomely-named "Finnish Central Association for Recreational Sports and Outdoor Activities") thought it only right and proper that a procession on skis should be held in his honour, from the Maunula ski-lodge in the capital's Central Park down to the Olympic Stadium and the new statue.

Unfortunately there was no snow, so this would have been a rather laborious and painful business. Nevertheless, something of a symbolic nature with a skiing touch to it had to be dreamed up.
The executive director of Suomen Latu Tuomo Jantunen decided to take a whole van-load of ski-poles up to Maunula, where they were handed out to those taking part in the procession.
This was the first recorded occasion when man had engaged in what became known as "Nordic walking", or sauvakävely in Finnish.

"They were long poles at that time", recalls Osmo Niemelä, a former orienteering enthusiast who competed at national level, who was among those who took part in that January march.
"It didn't actually feel all that strange, as a matter of fact. Cross-country skiers had trained using poles on steep gradients in the off-season summer months already earlier in the 1980s", says Niemelä. It was known in the trade as "hill bounding".

And if we are to be absolutely precise, there had been at least one experiment with "walking with sticks" for recreational exercise in 1987. Leena Jääskeläinen, now Rector of the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, had taken part in a 36-kilometre mass walk in Tampere, with cross-country ski-poles for company.
All the same, this was rather different. Those who walked to the Pihkala statue in January 1988 got themselves on television - the event was featured on the nightly Sportsdesk slot just after the main evening news.

The Nordic walking pioneers recognised pretty soon that they had invented an exercise discipline that was eminently well suited to the autumn and to the snow-starved winters of Southern Finland.
Nordic walking found a potent lobby-group in the country's sports institutes, who advocated heavily on its behalf.
However, the real breakthrough only came when technology and business caught up, and when Exel - a leading player in the manufacturing and development of carbon composite poles for alpine skiers and the cross-country crowd - came up with specialised poles just for this fitness sport.
Thereafter, things have happened fast. The sport has spread to forty countries, including Australia. There are now around seven million Nordic walkers worldwide.

The form of exercise has not surprisingly taken off fastest in those countries with a rich tradition of skiing, like Norway, Switzerland, and Austria, but at the same time large numbers of people in the flat lands of Holland and Denmark have also taken up their poles and walked.
In most countries the English name - Nordic walking - has been adopted and kept, but the Swedes have dubbed it stavgång, in Norway and Denmark it is stavgang, and to the Estonians it is kepikönd.

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print in the NYT weekly supplement of 19.1.2007

The Nordic walking superpowers, in millions of devotees, are: Germany (2.7m), FINLAND (1.5m), Austria (0.9m), Switzerland (0.5m), Norway (0.4m), Holland, Sweden, and Denmark.(all c. 0.3m).

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/When+F ... 5224515335

[sunny1011]

Gestern wurde der 10. Geburtstag vom kollektiven Nordic Walking in Paloheinä / Nord-Helsinki gefeiert. Zwei mal wöchentlich finden in Paloheinä organisierte Nordic Walking events statt, jew. dienstags und sonntags. Am Anfang haben knapp 300 Mitglieder mitgemacht. Zwischenzeitlich ist die Zahl der Mitglieder auf 50 gesunken. Lt. der Rekreationsorganisation betreiben 720.000 Finnen diese Sportart. 1,5 Mio. haben's zumindest ein mal versucht.

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Tenth+ ... 5229830790