Close trails, create cancer; study shows reduced heart disease, cancer in those who walk

I was recently reading one of the classic research studies on exercise and health: the Honolulu Heart Program study on walking and mortality done by Amy A. Hakim and colleagues from the University of Virginia, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 1998. Nonsmoking men in Honolulu aged 61-81 were strongly encouraged to walk daily and then followed for 12 years. Comparing those who walked more than 2 miles per day with those who walked less than one mile, deaths from heart disease were reduced by more than half among the walkers. The big surprise was that cancer deaths decreased more than heart disease deaths. That's huge, because heart deaths are often "one and done," whereas cancer takes months or years of dying and involves a lot of suffering. The message of this study is that walking 40 or more minutes a day will more than double our odds of getting through life without heart disease or cancer. But what if a person already has cancer? A June 2013 Oncology study by Dawn Lemanne and associates at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City found "robust associations between post-diagnosis exercise and decreased cancer-specific mortality." They found that three hours per week of walking for breast cancer and six hours per week of walking for colon cancer were ideal, while more vigorous exercise did not improve survival. You couldn't ask for better demonstrations of how important it is to provide attractive walking opportunities for our people. The Auburn Area Recreation and Park District, of which I am a proud board member, has three walking loops in our parks: at Recreation Park along Auburn-Folsom Road and Racetrack Street, in North Auburn Regional Park on Dry Creek Road, and in the Meadow Vista Park, all very well used. However, there are many people who just don't like walking on pavement and are only inspired to walk or jog by getting out in nature, probably because of the well-proven emotional and neurological effects of "nature therapy." I know. I'm one of them. My walk-jogs would be "seldom" if I didn't have trails. Of course, there are lots of trails down in the American River Canyon if you don't mind the drive to get there, the arduous climbs, the bears, the mountain lions, the rattlesnakes, the competition for parking and the greenhouse gasses produced from driving back up to civilization. So for all of those reasons, our canal trails are where many people go to get fresh air, clear their heads, surround themselves with nature's calm, get their bodies feeling good, spend time with a friend and, whether they know or not, make it much less likely they will leave this world early and miserably from cancer. About 20 years ago, you could walk from Weimar Crossroads halfway to Colfax on the Boardman Canal. Then, a landowner put up a fence and a gate, so they could use the canal trail but no one else could. Soon, other gates followed. Fifteen years ago, I could run from Clipper Gap to the Bowman carpool parking on the Boardman Canal, but then one landowner gated their property so they could use the canal trail but nobody else could. And then their neighbors did the same, until there were eight locked gates on that beautiful 1½-mile level canyon-side trail between the Bowman carpool parking and the culvert where the canal comes out from under the railroad. Now no one gets to walk, and not even the lock-gating landowners get to dramatically cut their cancer death risk. And just a year or two ago, a 1-mile stretch of the Boardman Canal on the hillside above I-80 at Applegate was posted and gated at Meadowgate Road, losing another opportunity to lower cancer death in that community. In 1972, I started riding my horse from Midway Heights, down the trails along the Bear River Canal in Meadow Vista to visit my friends Dave and Diane Claggett in Clipper Gap. The trails on both sides of the canal were unobstructed, showed signs of decades of regular use, and have been used by many people since, mostly for walking but also for running, bicycling and the occasional equestrian. But in the last year or two, landowners have gated the canal trails and use has simply stopped. That's a lot of people whose cancer death risk has been raised. That leaves just one canal trail in the Auburn area left open: the Boardman Canal from an area across the tracks from Placer High School, downstream past Overlook Park, Pacific Avenue, Maidu Drive and down toward Shirland Tract a couple miles. The stretch between Pacific and Maidu has recently been posted "Use by permission," which results in all users losing their legal rights to use that canal trail in five years. A couple miles downstream from Maidu, a landowner has lock-gated the canal trail. Unless something changes, there will soon be no canal trails available for walking in the Auburn area. What does that mean for cancer death in the Auburn area? As anyone in parks management will tell you, the more convenient and attractive we make exercise opportunities, the more people will exercise. For all those people who used to walk and jog or bike the canal trails, those were their favorite exercise places, and they will exercise less, or not at all, without them. Every time a trail closes, the people who walked there just had their risk of cancer death increase dramatically. What I hope for is a change of heart among landowners, now that they realize open canal trails dramatically reduce cancer death for visitors and landowners. The county, perhaps with a nudge from the Health Department, is willing to assist where special fencing (and invisible fencing for dogs) is needed to make canal trail use more agreeable. Exercise is huge for health, reducing all of the 10 leading causes of death in the USA – in descending order: heart disease, cancer, accidents, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer's, diabetes, kidney disease, influenza/pneumonia and suicide. When you put all those causes of death together, walking has a major effect on lifespan. In evaluating their data for "all-causes death," the Honolulu Heart Program study found the less-than-a-mile walkers accumulated the same number of deaths in seven years as the 2 miles-plus walkers accumulated in 12 years. Walking lowers death the best because it's continuous, has the right intensity and it's the one people are most willing to do if you give them a great place to do it. Let's get back to the cause of death that most terrifies us: cancer. We know when people lose their favorite place to walk, they walk less or not at all. So my question is to everyone who has blocked off a canal trail: How do you feel about doubling the number of cancer deaths among the people who used to walk your canal trail? And, as locked gates tend to metastasize, those who lock others out soon find themselves locked in. So I ask you: How do you feel about no longer being able to cut your own cancer death risk in half?