Out on Your Feet: The Hallucinatory World of Hundred-Mile Walking

For years Julie Welch edited the magazine of the Long Distance Walkers Association, a large group of people who meet up most weekends to accomplish arduously long walking challenges of 30, 40, and 50 miles long. She became more and more intrigued with the highlight of the long-distance-walking calendar: the annual Hundred. Walking 100 miles, nonstop, within 48 hours—watching the sun come up twice. Eventually she decided she had to try it. This is the story of the 50-mile walks she took part in to build up to the big day; the singular, admirable, sometimes eccentric, and above all tough members of the long-distance fraternity; and of the full wonder, pain, horror, exhilaration, and even hallucination (from groups of nuns to children's roadside picnics at 4 in the morning) of walking the Hundred.