T. Morgan Dixon Of GirlTrek On The Radical Power Of A Saturday Morning Walk

My best friend from college was doing the same, and we were on this kind of parallel track of holding each other accountable, of making good decisions, of budgeting our time in ways that honored things that lit us up. In doing so, we started doing that in a very public way, which looked like rallying our own friends with different health challenges, doing 5Ks, that kind of thing. It also looked like showing up at my classroom as a healthy teacher, which is hard. Part of being a healthy teacher was finding a solution to so many of the issues that were plaguing young black girls. So I started taking them hiking, so I could just talk to them about everything. Sex, eating right, depression, self-esteem, everything. I could just talk to them—because I didn't have time to do it when I was teaching history. And that's why it was called GirlTrek.

What happened is that it became a cascade of positive impact. Women who were battling depression got more vitamin D. Women who were feeling lonely in their apartments all of a sudden had people they could walk with and feel accountable to. Women who were 10 pounds, 30 pounds, 100 pounds overweight started shedding weight, just walking every day. So we knew we were onto something, and we set to rally a million black women to do the same.

Eight out of 10 black women who sit on a church pew every Sunday are over a healthy weight and have an advanced risk of dying early because of it. And the weight we carry comes from systemic injustice, comes from trauma, comes from poverty, comes from overworking, being under-resourced. Because of that, we are dying at higher rates. One hundred thirty-seven black women are dying every day. About 90% of black girls are projected to be over a healthy weight by the year 2030.

Insufficient. Unfortunately it feels insufficient because the scale of the crisis is so big, but it feels absolutely energizing at the same time.

We go at what we call a GirlTrek pace—it's a 15-minute mile. We try to get in 4 miles in one hour on Saturday mornings.

It is starting with what we call a "Talk before the walk," which informs women about the crisis, and ending with what we call a "Victory bridge," which is where we leave no woman behind and every single woman goes through the bridge before we all go home. That's what it feels like.

A thousand black women are going to the Rocky Mountains, and we're going to self-care our lives away. We are going to roast marshmallows, we're going to learn African dance, yoga. We're going to eat healthy food; we're going to convene and set intentions. We're going to do beautiful old hikes to Alpine lakes. And we're going to rest, and lie in the sun, and figure out how we collectively support each other in pacing our lives in a way that feels restorative.

It means making decisions every moment, every hour, that allow you to experience the abundance of God's grace. It means in a more radical sense, eliminating every barrier to that abundance. It's interesting, care-taking has been at the center of every labor movement. Care-taking is really about labor, and how you spend your labor. And how do you invest your labor on yourselves as opposed to giving it all away. It is not a bubble bath concept.

When we say that 70% of black women engage in no leisure time physical activity, it's because there is no leisure time. Where is the leisure? It's not about bubble baths, because black women are the cleanest women I've ever met in my entire life. We always smell good. It's not nail polish. We invented nail polish! When it comes to living and not dying, when it comes to prioritizing the care of your passion and purpose in life over service to others, that's when it becomes more radical.

Go to our website, and we have a national map where you put in your ZIP code and find a walk. If there's not a walk in your ZIP code, we encourage women to start one.

I've walked in so many amazing places. I really like the Nāpali Coastline in Hawaii. I love the hike that we do in the Rocky Mountains. It's maybe one of the most beautiful in the world. I'm currently in Ghana. I really enjoy walking in my neighborhood here. If I can walk with anybody in the world, that's a different question. I would really love walk with Wangari Maathai, who recently passed but was a Nobel Prize winner, because she's already done this. She's already mobilized women to plant 50 million trees in Kenya and has solved environmental deforestation. That's the level of social change we're going for.