I've lived in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles for a dozen years and I see the subject of the following article all the time.

One of the great things about being a journalist is being able to satisfy your curiosity about people and things that interest you.

I loved reporting and writing this piece -- I did it as a labor of love, confident that once I wrote it I could sell it. But for the life of me I could not sell it in LA or anywhere else.

As you'll no doubt notice from the New York angle at the top, this was the version I tried to sell in the Big Apple.

The piece starts here:

As a walking town Manhattan is overrated, in the opinion of Marc Abrams, a man who likes to walk.

“New York is not a great walking city,” according to Abrams. “It’s nice if you want to walk around the neighborhoods. But it’s really not that exciting because you always have to cross the streets.

"If you’re walking from 40th to 60th Street it’s really only a little over a mile and there’s lights all over the place. For long walks Chicago is better. San Francisco is better. L.A. is better.”

That’s L.A. as in Los Angeles, car capital of the universe, where, someone forgot to tell Abrams, nobody walks.

In the past 26 years Adams has logged, estimating a conservative 15 miles a day, 142,350 miles of vigorous perambulation, enough to circle the globe nearly six times, were he equipped to walk on water.

The secrets to a good walk, as far as he is concerned, are “long streets with not too many traffic lights, plus the streets have to be fairly wide, so they accommodate cars plus walkers.”

For the past quarter century Abrams has walked mostly in Silverlake, the neighborhood where he lives between Hollywood and downtown that takes its name from a fenced-off reservoir at its center.

“Nice scenery is also important,” he added, sweeping a deeply tanned arm toward the concrete-lined lake. “How do you improve upon this?”

On a typically balmy February afternoon, Abrams was halfway through his daily four-hour walk, his slight, sinewy frame clad only in sneakers and his trademark salmon-colored shorts.

His pace was brisk, his gait stiff – he suffered multiple knee injuries playing college football, which is why he does not walk on the sidewalks.

“To much up and down from the curb to the street to the curb,” he said, barely breaking stride to scoop up a rubber band from the asphalt and drop it in his pocket.

“Dogs sometimes chew on these things. So I pick ‘em up so they don’t eat 'em.”

In a lifetime of long walks that began when he was a child in Philadelphia (“We didn’t have a car. If I needed to be somewhere I just walked.”)

Abrams has walked in Spain, England and Austria, including frequent day trips from Vienna into the alps.

He did not go to these places for the purpose of walking. He walks wherever he happens to be.

His longest walk so far was from Oxford, during a year of study there,
into London (45 miles, 13 ½ hours).

He once walked from Stanford, where he was enrolled in medical school, to San Franciso (35 miles, 10 hours).

For a while Abrams held traditional jobs, but eventually he grew tired of sitting in an office while the sun shone.

He decided to open his own practice in family medicine, one that would not open until late afternoon, enabling him to walk all day.

The concept has proven extremely popular — patients begin arriving
when he opens his doors at 4 p.m. and keep coming until he locks up, often after midnight.

“You know, my first two years I had very few patients, but I knew I wanted to be my own boss and I’d do whatever it took to do that,” he said. “It took borrowing $450,000 and taking back 3 mortgages on my house, and I did it because I believe in myself and I believe in my abilities. So I structured my life a certain way, but I also took chances, took risks.”

A bus rumbled past.

“Basically the walking is kind of like the tip of the iceberg. I think I’m a pretty good doctor. I care about people. I’m always accessible. I give my patients my cell phone number so they can call me if
they need to. Most doctors would never do that.”

As he talked and walked – in the middle of the street -- he seemed unconcerned about a silver Honda SUV heading straight for him.

"If you believe in people, you know,they're not gonna abuse your trust," he said. The Honda silently swerved and passed. “Some will. But most won’t.

In all his years of walking, Abrams has had only one mishap.

“I was walking behind a van that was sticking out of a driveway into the street and unfortunately the guy in the van didn’t see me and the back hatch came up and it literally took the top of my scalp off. But I healed pretty quickly. I put some vitamin E on it, it stopped bleeding and it healed up within five days.”

Abrams, who will soon turn 55, said he has never missed a day of work and never goes more than a couple of days without walking.

Next to walking, his favorite exercise is swimming, and he tries to get in a couple of miles a day in his private pool.

“The craziest thing I unfortunately never did was swim around Manhattan. They have this race every year -- it’s 28 ½ miles -- and I entered it one year, and then I found out that they didn’t allow wetsuits. It suddenly occurred to me why the winners are these big
men and women.

"My body fat is two to three percent. I couldn’t survive in that 60-degree water for ten hours without a wetsuit. I would not do well.”

He paused, surveying a steep hill in his path.

“With a wetsuit I would do well.”