The morning I meet Michael Schneider at a quaint Glendale cafe, it quickly becomes clear that he came here on foot. His sneakers are the first clue – worn white Nike sneakers, stained with dirt. It’s unseasonably warm this morning and his sweat-stained forehead offers the second clue. Her slim, fit figure dispels my suspicions.

“I’ve probably already walked over 10,000 steps today,” he tells me proudly, checking the health data on his phone to be sure — and it’s only 10:30 a.m.

In a city built for cars, Schneider is committed to exploring the city on foot, often leaving his Adams Hill home at 11 p.m., in the dark, to take his steps once the workday is over. In fact, over the past two decades, Schneider, 51, has traveled around Los Angeles on foot 18 times, covering nearly 300 miles in total during those trips. But he didn’t do it alone.

Schneider is the founder of Great walk in Los Angelesan annual citywide event he launched in 2006 to mark the 10th anniversary of his move from Chicago. What started as a DIY, mobile celebration of Los Angeles – with just his wife, a handful of friends and several dozen readers of his blog, Franklin Avenue – has grown into a local tradition, attracting up to 500 participants each November on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Each stroll stretches the entire length of an iconic Los Angeles boulevard, covering approximately 14 to 16 miles and stopping along the way to explore its sun-baked sidewalks and faded public murals, shopping boutiques high-end furniture, its cheap motels and historic churches, its food carts. filled with fresh fruit and its bustling highway overpasses – from below.

The very first Grande Marche, inspired by a journalist That of Kevin Roderick Book from 2005, “Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles”, Participants traveled more than 15 miles from Wilshire, from downtown Los Angeles to the ocean. The only marketing Schneider did for the event was a simple blog post announcing the hike. About forty people were present.

“It was almost a joke,” says Schneider, senior television editor at trade publication Variety. “I had no idea how many people would come.”

The second march, which attracted 100 people, took place on Pico Boulevard, inspired by the Times food critic. Jonathan Goldwho is famous he ate in the street in his early twenties. Gold then emailed Schneider food cessation recommendations. Since then, the event has expanded to Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, among others.

In addition to being a great pre-holiday workout, the Great Walk debunks the still-persistent beliefs that Los Angeles is not a walkable city and that its physical sprawl hinders the ability to build community. Many people met during the Great Walk, including Westwood residents Cat and Steve Whalen, who eventually marriage in 2023. They still do the walk every year.

“I remember bonding over the architecture of this old public warehouse,” Cat Whalen said of meeting her husband in 2016. “It was an event that combined our love of walking and urban landscapes and architecture – and, of course, there is the social component.”

Over the years, participants ranged from babies in strollers to residents in their 80s. Participants arrive alone or with a community group. Since 2017, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad came with members of her Always on foot non-profit, which encourages walking for health and human connection. Marchers came from as far as Amsterdam and Japan to join the festivities; one man comes every year from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to participate – barefoot. It has become part of the colorful fabric of the event.

“I always meet him halfway through the walk,” Schneider says. “He has his camera and he is barefoot. That’s exactly what he does.

The Great March was covered by blogs, TV stations and local newspapers, including The times. But less has been written about Schneider himself, who has accumulated nearly 20 years of knowledge wandering the city’s peaks and valleys.

Sitting in the café, Schneider looks every bit the suburban dad. He wears a salt-and-pepper goatee and a zip-up hoodie, and takes every opportunity to brag about his two sons, 19 and 15, who have joined the march almost every year of their lives. Her eldest participated for the first time at 1.5 years old and her youngest at 3 months old.

But Schneider’s normcore exterior hides an undercurrent of intensity: It takes a particular, obsessive mindset to conceive and execute such an ambitious public expedition every year for two decades. (The Great March even continued during the pandemic.) Not to mention chronic these journeys in detailed blog posts, meticulously archived online. This requires a passion for cities, urban history and, perhaps, cartography; an affinity for architecture and urban design; a love of community; and a talent for numbers. During our interview, Schneider repeatedly referenced statistics from his weight loss app Noom, his cornflower blue eyes twinkling as he talked about calorie intake versus exercise expenditure in steps and steps. kilometers.

In short, he’s a collector. Miles and health statistics, vinyl records, books about Los Angeles – and people. He first developed the habit as an Air Force brat, moving with his family between the Philippines, Oklahoma and Hawaii, when he began obsessively hoarding information in the television sector.

“I was that kid, at 7 years old, who knew who Ted Turner “, Schneider says with a laugh. “I collected TV guides from all the cities we passed through on vacation.”

After college at Northwestern and a year working between Chicago and Washington, D.C., Schneider moved to Los Angeles in 1996 with specialty television publication Electronic Media. In 1999, he landed a job as a journalist at Variety and met his wife, Maria. He wasn’t much of an athlete, but she liked to walk. Their first dates were spent exploring the city on foot, including taking Los Angeles Conservatory downtown walking tours and hikes in Griffith Park. Schneider fell in love with Los Angeles’ history and found that walking its concrete expanses helped him feel more rooted in the city.

“When I arrived in Los Angeles, I asked myself: Where is the core?” he said. “I didn’t understand why people didn’t know where to gather. Now I understand. It’s all these different cores.

Schneider has also collected a handful of strange and serendipitous moments from the Great March. The event saw weddings in progress, camera crews filming and even buildings on fire. Once, in 2009, the group marched in front of the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center on Washington Boulevard and Magic Johnson appeared in the window to encourage them. Two years earlier, on Pico Boulevard, a crane holding a billboard toppled over and chaos ensued.

“Traffic was stopped, police were everywhere, no one could get through,” Schneider remembers. “But there we were, moving on.”

Schneider doesn’t make money from the Great March; It’s free for attendees and doesn’t pay to advertise the event. In recent years, some sponsors, including the Times, might offer him free advertising, for example, or hand out water in exchange for a mention on the blog.

“But there is no business model,” Schneider says. “We are not an official organization. It’s simply a group of people coming together to walk.

Nineteen years of crisscrossing Los Angeles on foot have given Schneider a rare bird’s-eye view of the city, from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. And he has had to modify his walk as the city around him has transformed.

“In recent years, obviously, there has been a lot more homeless in the streets, with even more waste,” he says. “So I was careful to try to choose streets where that was less of a problem.”

The city construction boom This has also been particularly visible, he says.

“The scale of the changes we have seen in recent years in development is positive. More housing, more buildings. But it’s also sad when you pass this historic building, as the Ambassador (Hotel)is no longer there – that’s a negative,” he says.

Schneider kicks off each Grand March at an iconic venue, such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Shrine Auditorium or the Park Rose Garden Exposition, where a guest speaker usually gives a pep talk. Roderick and Nyad took to the megaphone, as did the artist-urban explorer Charles Phoenix and journalist-historical preservationist Chris Nichols. And there is always an “afterparty” in a location close to the finish line.

This year’s walk will honor Schneider’s family. He has a son at UCLA and a nephew at USC. The march will therefore begin downtown, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, in Exposition Park, near the USC campus, and will end on the UCLA campus, at the Bruin Statue. Between these points, the 14.2-mile hike will pass through portions of Vermont Avenue, Washington Boulevard, Culver Boulevard, Overland Avenue, Pico Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard.

“It turns out that in recent years, the Saturday before Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving Day. USC-UCLA match“, Schneider said. “I was like, OK, this is so good. We have to do this.

Where will the Grande Marche take place next year, for its 20th anniversary?

“Back to Wilshire,” Schneider said without pause. “It’ll have to be the OG.”

Although the Great LA Walk can be associated with exercise, Schnieder repeatedly reminds participants that the goal is to go slow.

“It’s about taking your time,” he says. “Walk into a store you’ve never seen, take the time to look at a sculpture, stop at that church. The key is to feel like you know more about Los Angeles. I’m still learning things. I still see things I’ve never seen before.

At the end of our conversation, Schneider does what he always does. He gets out and starts walking.