🚶‍♂️Strolling with the lightpole-famous "Men's Walking Group"

The most common billboard in the neighborhood isn’t for Kris Lindahl or TSR or Nicolet Law.

It’s for the "Men's Walking Group."

The preponderance of these micro-billboards — really just business cards stapled to light poles — is the reason I’m walking toward the Riverview Theater at an unholy hour on a recent Tuesday. I need to know what’s up with this group. Is it real? An inside joke? A social experiment? Has it been around for a year or a decade or a century?  

Turns out, it’s about as straightforward as the marketing strategy: A group of men, ideally but not necessarily above the age of 45, who meet every other Tuesday at 5:30 in the morning to walk around the neighborhood and chat before the day begins. 

Greeting me in the clinic parking lot across from the theater is Arnold Carlson, a neighborhood sculptor who cooked up the idea for the group two years ago as a way to connect with other men, which he's found to be more difficult as he's aged. And since family duties keep him busy starting around 8 a.m., he decided on 5:30 as the standing start time.