  Slowly walking technicolor models provide a mechanism for electroweak
symmetry breaking whose nonperturbative lattice investigation is rather
challenging. Here we demonstrate walking near a conformal fixed point
considering the 2-d lattice O(3) model at vacuum angle $\theta \approx \pi$.
The essential features of walking technicolor models are shared by this toy
model and can be accurately investigated by numerical simulations. We show
results for the running coupling and the beta-function and we perform a finite
size scaling analysis of the massgap close to the conformal point.
