Walk aims to get us moving

Gary Marino has a pretty good thing going: Wake up 7 to 7:30 every morning, have breakfast, do a radio interview, walk six to eight miles, talk to a corporate or civic group, then walk another six to eight miles before calling it a day.

How did he land this gig? Just lost 150 pounds.

First, he had to have a wake-up call.

"Several wake-up calls, actually," concedes Marino, who turned his own effort to shed weight into a crusade to get sluggish Americans off the couch and walking.

Marino shared his story during a walk Tuesday morning down busy Western Boulevard. He and Kathy Higgins had just reached the midpoint in their 650-mile walk across the state, a 10-week effort called the Million Step March intended to get North Carolinians from Asheville to Wilmington out of their recliners and into their Reeboks. The effort is sponsored by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, where Higgins is vice president of community relations.

Marino and Higgins aren't the only ones participating: Residents across the state can log onto www.BetterHealthNC.com and log their own daily walks. In fact, folks don't even need to walk. If you prefer, say, dancing, you can plug in the amount of time you dance into the site's Activity Step Chart, which will convert minutes danced into the equivalent of steps taken.

Participants can win weekly prizes (GPS, backpack and Camelback, among others) and a grand prize of a one-year membership to a YMCA or a Bowflex Home Gym System.

The walk aims to get the 58 percent of North Carolinians who don't get enough exercise up and moving. To that end, Marino and Higgins are taking neither the most scenic nor direct route from Asheville to Wilmington. After leaving Asheville they went to Black Mountain and Hickory, dropped down to Charlotte, went north to Winston-Salem and Greensboro, then inched their way (averaging about 12 miles a day, with a day of rest on Sunday) to the Triangle on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. From here, it was on to Greenville, then down to Wilmington with a scheduled arrival on June 11.

It's a route that has allowed them to spread the word with stops at major corporations (700 employees at BB&T) to small nonprofits such as the Presbyterian Children's Home in Black Mountain, where 35 kids went nuts over the simplest of gifts: jump ropes.

"They must have jumped for an hour and a half," said Don Bradley, BCBSNC's chief medical officer, who is tagging along for three weeks of the march.

They have persuaded furniture workers in Hickory to try yoga and eat veggie burgers, they've told a group of 50-something women in Gastonia -- "Women who have spent all their time taking care of others," says Higgins -- that it's OK to do something for yourself.

After finally answering one of those persistent wake-up calls -- "When I was a Super Bowl party away from hitting 400 pounds" -- Marino decided it was time for a change. Not just for him, but for a nation that was ballooning along with him.

He turned his Boston-based entertainment production business over to his wife, Julie, and launched Generation Excel. His goal was to organize walks to raise awareness about obesity. His first effort was the 1,205-mile Million Calorie March from Florida to Boston.

"I had trouble finding corporate support for that one," he says walking past a now-forbidden Bojangles on Western Boulevard. "I had a guy at a sneaker company tell me, 'You know, you could take a bus and do that.'"

But two campaigns later, BCBSNC came looking for him. The company, which provides health insurance to one in three North Carolinians, has a financial stake in the venture: 61 percent of its own customers are obese or overweight, making them more likely to seek health-care services.

Marino walks to show folks that if a guy like him can do it, they can, too.

"I'm not a pitchman for weight loss," he adds. "I'm a pitchman for commitment."