For two days in a row now, as I’ve driven to work, I’ve seen this guy walking backwards down the street. Not just a couple steps, I saw him doing it for half a block or so as I stopped at a light.
This is Cupertino, CA, which has a large Asian population, and this was a fairly ordinary looking middle-aged Asian man carrying something like a newspaper in one hand, and otherwise just looking like he was walking to work. He didn’t appear to be doing it for a lark of any kind, more like he had some perfectly ordinary reason to be walking backwards. Some wierd-ass religous penance or observance? Something prescribed by some motivational technique? Any ideas?
Maybe he’a sociologist. They like to carry out strange experiments where they behave oddly to see how people react. In fact, there were famous studies done where people did walk backwards down the street to see what the reactions would be.
There’s a guy I bump into quite frequently running backwards. I finally asked him why he does that bizarre thing. He said it is easier than running forwards. Actually, some people sometimes run backwards as it uses different muscles than running forward. They do that to strengthen their quardriceps as well as hamstrings. I don’t think, however, that walking would have a significant effect on musculature.
Perhaps if there is a strong wind, he will never have a headwind that slows him down. Of course the tailwind would slow him down, but he can brag how fast he ran with a headwind.
I could see extinguishing street lights as you pass back in the Victorian era, when they had gas lights. Either backwards or frontwards. (You can take that any way you like.)
Bizarre. I live in Raleigh, and just a couple of days ago while riding the bus, I saw this guy walking down a sidewalk backwards. Not really walking, as I would normally call it; he would stand still for about 5 seconds, take a step backwards, wait another 5 seconds, take another step, wait, step,… I don’t know what he was doing, but I watched him do it for about a minute or so. This guy was Asian, too; is some sort of conspiracy brewing?
There was this guy in downtown Los Angeles who would always be walking backwards to the YMCA every morning. Once inside, he would not only walk backwards on the indoor track, but would walk backwards AGAINST the running direction. He had to be told several times to walk backwards in the correct direction.
If all the residents of China jumped off chairs at the same time, we’ve already established that they wouldn’t knock the Earth out of orbit. Now, the experiment is underway to find out if everyone walking backwards across the surface of the Earth would reverse the planet’s rotation.
I’ll be on the lookout for people carrying birdcages and slapping trees. I also learned:
Several sports trainers suggest that running backwards burns more calories, improves coordination and strengthens quads and hamstrings better than running forwards. They state that among football players, defensive backs, who run backwards a lot, have the strongest hamstrings.
Advice given to Parkinson’s disease patients includes trying to walk backwards if they “freeze up” while walking.
