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Step Challenge: Week 1
May. 8th, 2014 08:37 pmSo, I am taking up my employer's challenge to walk 50,000 steps per week for six weeks. Though today I learned that we get to blow a week and still consider ourselves a success.
My baseline number of steps on work days (doing just the minimum of what I normally do) is about 6,000. If I also pace at the bus stop, like I learned to do when I first got my pedometer many years ago, that adds a couple/five hundred more. Walking during lunch adds two to three thousand more. And taking one of the two buses that drops me off on Duval instead of Cameron adds another three thousand. I found a bus stop for the trip home with three acceptable bus routes, so I just get on whichever of these buses comes first because I hate waiting for buses, hoping longingly that I will get to go home some day.
My baseline number of steps on weekend days is about 500. Because my hobbies mainly involve sitting.
So, since I work only 4 days per week, this really is a challenge, even if I don't ever get the good bus.
My strategy is to try for 10K steps each work day and 5K steps each weekend day for a total of 55K steps. This is a good compromise between a reasonable amount of steps for human health (supposedly 10K - 15K per day) and the amount I actually do.
One week has gone by and so far I have made all my goals, so that's been a nice surprise.
Work day strategies: pace at the bus stop and walk during lunch of course. (And I haven't been walking during lunch for the past couple of weeks previously, so that's still a good thing.) Then, if I catch the good bus, I walk around the block* a few times after I get home. Just every hour or two, I'll leave the house and walk around the block once, which is just over 500 steps. So I've actually been catching the good bus and thus barely achieving my goal most days; the day with the bad bus I walked 11,217 steps.
*Not my block. Like people who live on cul-de-sacs, walking around my block is complicated. For example, it is bounded by ten roads. But the block across the street is a tiny block bounded by four roads as expected. (I think Chikuru, Raaga123, and maybe Indigo Rose have a similar situation.) I've often told myself I should get up off my butt and walk around the block periodically, but I haven't actually done it until this week. (And I'm still not doing it once I've met my goal.)
Weekend days are rougher. One day I made an excuse to walk somewhere (to see if Old Navy has any of those nice t-shirts like I have--but no, those tissue-weight t-shirts are still in). One day I did my pilates video--the challenge folks have a converter where you select your activity, say what your heart rate was during the activity, and say how many minutes you were doing this activity, and it calculates a step equivalent. That turned out to be just over 3K steps. I already can't remember what I did the third day--I think I just paced a lot at home and walked around the block a few times.
So here is the summary:
Official challenge - 50K steps
My goals - 55K steps
My actual total - 58,571 steps
And what are the side effects? Anything good?
One side effect might be that I have more mosquito bites. Though it's spring, and I generally have more mosquito bites in spring anyway, so maybe not.
One is that I have a new blazer, because I stopped in at some other stores on the way home from Old Navy. Not sure if that's good or not yet.
I've noticed that all the other yards on the block are better than mine.
And if I have any neighbors who are looking out their windows a lot spying on everyone, then they are probably not having the best opinion of me. I mean, sometimes I walk in a wavy path instead of a straight path, like the girl in "True Stories," to get more steps, which might make me look a little crazy. At the very least, I might be a suspicious character, clearly checking out all those yards.
I think I have so far succeeded in not subconsciously deciding that since I am burning several extra calories each day, I can therefore eat several hundred extra calories to make up for that.
My baseline number of steps on work days (doing just the minimum of what I normally do) is about 6,000. If I also pace at the bus stop, like I learned to do when I first got my pedometer many years ago, that adds a couple/five hundred more. Walking during lunch adds two to three thousand more. And taking one of the two buses that drops me off on Duval instead of Cameron adds another three thousand. I found a bus stop for the trip home with three acceptable bus routes, so I just get on whichever of these buses comes first because I hate waiting for buses, hoping longingly that I will get to go home some day.
My baseline number of steps on weekend days is about 500. Because my hobbies mainly involve sitting.
So, since I work only 4 days per week, this really is a challenge, even if I don't ever get the good bus.
My strategy is to try for 10K steps each work day and 5K steps each weekend day for a total of 55K steps. This is a good compromise between a reasonable amount of steps for human health (supposedly 10K - 15K per day) and the amount I actually do.
One week has gone by and so far I have made all my goals, so that's been a nice surprise.
Work day strategies: pace at the bus stop and walk during lunch of course. (And I haven't been walking during lunch for the past couple of weeks previously, so that's still a good thing.) Then, if I catch the good bus, I walk around the block* a few times after I get home. Just every hour or two, I'll leave the house and walk around the block once, which is just over 500 steps. So I've actually been catching the good bus and thus barely achieving my goal most days; the day with the bad bus I walked 11,217 steps.
*Not my block. Like people who live on cul-de-sacs, walking around my block is complicated. For example, it is bounded by ten roads. But the block across the street is a tiny block bounded by four roads as expected. (I think Chikuru, Raaga123, and maybe Indigo Rose have a similar situation.) I've often told myself I should get up off my butt and walk around the block periodically, but I haven't actually done it until this week. (And I'm still not doing it once I've met my goal.)
Weekend days are rougher. One day I made an excuse to walk somewhere (to see if Old Navy has any of those nice t-shirts like I have--but no, those tissue-weight t-shirts are still in). One day I did my pilates video--the challenge folks have a converter where you select your activity, say what your heart rate was during the activity, and say how many minutes you were doing this activity, and it calculates a step equivalent. That turned out to be just over 3K steps. I already can't remember what I did the third day--I think I just paced a lot at home and walked around the block a few times.
So here is the summary:
Official challenge - 50K steps
My goals - 55K steps
My actual total - 58,571 steps
And what are the side effects? Anything good?
One side effect might be that I have more mosquito bites. Though it's spring, and I generally have more mosquito bites in spring anyway, so maybe not.
One is that I have a new blazer, because I stopped in at some other stores on the way home from Old Navy. Not sure if that's good or not yet.
I've noticed that all the other yards on the block are better than mine.
And if I have any neighbors who are looking out their windows a lot spying on everyone, then they are probably not having the best opinion of me. I mean, sometimes I walk in a wavy path instead of a straight path, like the girl in "True Stories," to get more steps, which might make me look a little crazy. At the very least, I might be a suspicious character, clearly checking out all those yards.
I think I have so far succeeded in not subconsciously deciding that since I am burning several extra calories each day, I can therefore eat several hundred extra calories to make up for that.