'I really don't know why I'm doing this' - meet the real 'Forrest Gump' walking every New York City block

Record ID: 1434681

  • Title: 'I really don't know why I'm doing this' - meet the real 'Forrest Gump' walking every New York City block
  • Date: 1st October 2019
  • Summary: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (RECENT - SEPTEMBER 19, 2019) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF WALKER, MATT GREEN, WALKING IN FRONT OF VIEW OF NEW YORK SKYLINE (SOUNDBITE) (English) NEW YORK CITY WALKER, MATT GREEN, SAYING: "This is the Kosciusko [KUH - SHU -SKO] bridge or the Kosciusko [KOSH - EE - AH - SKO] bridge, as a real New Yorker would call it. And this is this is a new pathway that just opened a couple of weeks ago. And so I already walked the neighborhood around here, but I had to come back to walk this new path, now that it's open." GREEN'S HEAD GREEN WALKING PAST SKYLINE (SOUNDBITE) (English) NEW YORK CITY WALKER, MATT GREEN, SAYING: "Yeah I don't, I don't really know why I'm doing this. I think a lot of times, we kind of put too much pressure on ourselves to come up with a nice, easily explainable reason for what we want to do in life. And, I suspect there are a lot of people who have really cool things they want to do and they never do them because they don't have a good reason for it. So I don't know, after spending a lot of my life just doing things that were easy to explain to people, I decided to try this thing that's hard to explain that I don't really have an explanation for, and just see how it goes." VIEW OF BRIDGE FROM CAMERA ON GREEN VARIOUS OF GREEN TAKING PHOTO OF NEW YORK SKYLINE FROM SMART PHONE (SOUNDBITE) (English) NEW YORK CITY WALKER, MATT GREEN, SAYING: "Yeah, I did that walk in 2010. I did my walk across America, came back. I just realized I was the happiest I'd ever been in my life, and also I spent almost no money doing it. I would knock on people's doors, asking if I could camp in their yard and like all the costs were so low. And it just really changed the calculations. I realized if I don't live a normal life and have to pay rent and have all those kind of expenses, which didn't seem to be making me any happier, than I could have a chance to do something a lot different in my life."
  • Embargoed: 15th October 2019 21:48
  • Keywords: Matt Green Imjustwalkin.com Forrest Gump walking five boroughs
  • Location: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES / INTERNET
  • City: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES / INTERNET
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: Human Interest / Brights / Odd News,Society/Social Issues
  • Reuters ID: LVA001AZ9PIS9
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: The desire to avoid the monotony of adult life has led one man to ditch housing and employment and spend his days walking every block of New York City.
    Matt Green, 39, graduated as a civil engineer from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. But seven and a half years ago he decided to go off the grid and begin scaling by the foot the five boroughs of New York City - Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.
    Green said he's over 95% done, having walked the some 8,000 miles (13,000 km) of the city. According to Green, doing the job right means walking every street, park and beach. His biggest remaining assignment, as he told Reuters during a recent walk, is to compile all the data and stories for his blog. And as he puts it, his quest is really not much more complicated than the name of the blog, imjustwalkin.com.
    "I don't really know why I'm doing this," he told Reuters while walking over the pedestrian path on the newly public Kosciuszko Bridge connecting the Brooklyn and Queens boroughs. "I think a lot of times, we kind of put too much pressure on ourselves to come up with a nice, easily explainable reason for what we want to do in life… After spending a lot of my life just doing things that were easy to explain to people, I decided to try this thing that's hard to explain that I don't really have an explanation for and just see how it goes."
    Green said he has had many real-life inspirations who aren't just "Forrest Gump", including Gary Hause, who walked across America.
    And after hearing about House's feat, Green decided he too could pull it off too. So about a decade ago he made the trek across America from equally named Rockaway Beaches in New York and Oregon.
    Green has also ridden every subway in New York in a 24-hour span.
    Ditching the working world for the walking world has come easy to Green, he told Reuters.
    "The way I finally figured out how to make it work financially was to just not have an apartment and not pay rent," he told Reuters. "And so for over the seven-and-a-half years I've been doing this, I've just been in New York City but, you know, sleeping on couches, watching people's cats when they're out of town, watering people's plants when they're gone and just a whole kind of array of ways to find places to live for free."
    The experience has provided him with an appreciation for living in the moment.
    "This idea that, you know, so much of life is boring, and we're just trying to get through this and get through that, so we get to the few fun things we have to do in life, I think is just a matter of having a bad outlook," he said.
    "Because the nature of this walk, of treating every block the same, and therefore not having any particular destinations, I know I'll get to everywhere eventually and so I'm never really looking forward to any particular part, really just keeps me where I am and it just makes me focus on what's right around me."
    (Production by: Dan Fastenberg, Hussein al Waaile)
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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