One Mall Walk for Man, One Mall Leap for Mankind

If you don’t want to brave jogging in the cold or suffer through the sweaty, factory-like intensity of the gym, there’s always the mall. Wandering through a mall is actually approved by the Centers for Disease Control as a method of exercise — mall walking groups across the country lure fitness enthusiasts to local shopping centers for a healthy dose of conversation, cardio, and capitalism. Even in Boston, you can find plenty of mall walkers ambling through Copley Place and the Prudential Center, getting in their daily steps.
But mall walking is conspicuously absent from Cambridge’s local mall, CambridgeSide Galleria. So, armed with my running shoes and a 56-page CDC mall walking manual, I decided to investigate the situation. Though I’m not exactly the mall walking demographic — all of the mall walkers quoted in the CDC guide were over the age of 70 — I can count the number of times I have exercised in college on one hand, so I figured that I could perhaps stand in for the typical mall walker.

Stepping inside the building for the first time, I was struck with the immediate sense that CambridgeSide could not be a more ideal location for a midday mall walk: It was suffused with natural light and had wide, clearly delineated walkways, sprinkled with clusters of sofas upon which to recover (see CDC guide tip 6f: “determine a route(s) where benches or rest areas are available at periodic intervals”). Instead of the saccharine muzak I associate with malls, pleasantly jangly, buoyant indie pop filled the space (see CDC tip 6g: “determine type and volume of background music”). The mall was temperate as could be — just cold enough that I could keep my coat on without being uncomfortable, but just warm enough that I could thaw from the unseasonably frigid rain pouring outside. It was a mall walking paradise.

But where were my fellow mall walkers? Both representatives of mall management I talked to — a man at the welcome desk and a customer service agent — could not point me to a mall walking program, and seemed baffled by the entire concept of walking through a mall purely for exercise. In my extensive pre-mall walk research, I learned that a recent $30 million makeover had transformed the mall formerly known as the Cambridgeside Galleria into a hip and eco-friendly “haven for teens,” in the words of the Boston Globe. Could I be the mall walking radical that CambridgeSide needs?

I turned to my mall walking bible for help. The CDC advises “walkers” (the technical term) to formulate a route ahead of time and to clearly demarcate it with stickers placed on mall landmarks along the way. But given that I had no experience with mall walking nor had I ever been to CambridgeSide, I had no plan, so I did a first round of meandering to scope out the most effective route.

After this first pass, I decided that I was ready for a capital-M, capital-W Mall Walk — no breaks, no excuses. CambridgeSide is roughly dog-bone shaped, with main walkways branching off into two circular nooks at either end, so I decided to walk the perimeter of each floor, being sure to loop through every alcove. I fired up my iPhone pedometer at the food court for the first and only time, and set off. I walked at such a clip that I ended up navigating the entirety of the mall in 15 minutes, clocking in at 0.5 miles, a not-insignificant chunk of my daily step count. I’m embarrassed to note that the walk did leave me slightly winded, but my consolation is that I did not take any breaks, save for briefly looking into a vacant Kay Jewellers because a disconcerting whirring sound was emanating from inside. I was on a mission, so the mystery remained unsolved.

As I traversed CambridgeSide’s three floors, I wondered if the mall was as much of a “teen haven” as the Boston Globe reported it to be. Maybe walkers would not feel out of place surrounded by hordes of teenage mallrats. Though I did see a kiosk selling plush toys of off-brand emojis, I remained hopeful: the people I saw wandering the mall seemed to be mostly professionals taking their lunch breaks. I stopped inside Hollister, an iconic purveyor of teen garb, and found it to be eerily empty. Pasted on the walls were photos from ad campaign titled “Carpe Now,” in which a bunch of “influencers” wearing indistinguishable parkas and sprawling across a picturesque snowy landscape encouraged me to seize the moment by buying coats, because “COAT” was actually an acronym for the “Carpe-ist of All Time.” This combination of memes, butchered Latin, and winter wear was so incomprehensible to me that I felt an acute sense of existential dread and had to leave the store immediately.

Perhaps CambridgeSide lacked teens because I was there at 1pm on a Tuesday, when the teens are said to be in class. But before I left I did see a young couple — mallrats? — holding hands walking inside American Eagle Outfitters, and a squad of boys — definitely mallrats! — guzzling Arizona iced teas and slurping up Panda Express chow mein in the food court, and let the warm glow of youthful delinquency wash over me.

As I wandered towards the door, invigorated by my newfound commitment to health and wellness, a flyer caught my eye. “Fit and Fabulous Outdoor Series,” it proclaimed in a bouncy cursive font, before listing a series of fitness classes hosted in CambridgeSide: a barre class, a “kicks and conditioning” class, a “Bollywood-inspired fitness dance class.” Until I find a CDC guide for each of these classes, I’ll stick with mall walking for now.