Promises to keep.
Today I'm going to talk about a little experiment I've been running, or I suppose you could say walking. In fact, I'm finding it impossible not to say that even though I know it sucks (you'll see). But I've already lost four hours in the process of composing this minor entry, so I'm going to have to move past the word play if I want to beat the sunset. Not rereading my last two years of entries and a recap of Deadwood would have helped on that front too, of course; ahh, hindsight. And unheeded foresight, if we're being honest.
And while we're on the subject of avoidable delay, I faced a touch of the old choice paralysis with respect to this entry's title. You know I favor the quotations, but this time there are simply too many. "525,600 Paces"? "A journey of a thousand miles"? "So get on my side"1? There are dozens of possibilities - tweaked or untweaked - all of them bad. I went, as I generally do, for the hoariest. Try making that your mantra (just keep repeating it under your breath) and see if all kinds of interesting situations don't occur.
The experiment: back on Mardi Gras or perhaps the Monday before, I went to Sports Authority and bought new walking shoes and a pedometer. I aimed to walk 10,000 steps a day for the next 46 days (counting Sundays). The experiment thus took the form of a Lenten obligation, and if you're thinking, 'Since when does byelka58 observe Lent?', know this: I don't turn down free structure, regardless of the source. Lent is like the NaNoWriMo of behavior modification: more serious than a New Year's resolution, with a built-in sense of community. And a time limit! Plus, late winter/early spring is a very nice time to be walking in Atlanta. It's not too hot, not too cold, Orion is out, and various things are leafing and sprouting and chirping.
What you really want to know is whether I did it. The answer is: basically. 46 days x 10,000 steps = 460,000 steps, yes? And I took 500,267, or approximately 10,875 steps a day. Still, there were four days when I was under. The day of Jen's wedding I only clocked 2,439 (you'd think the pedometer would be invisible under an empire-waist dress, but it wasn't, so it stayed home). (On the other hand, the day before Easter I took 21,823.) At the beginning I told myself "no deals" - meaning I couldn't bank hours against future laziness, or make up missed hours later - so ethically I failed. Thank goodness for math, eh? My coworkers who got involved in the effort towards the end wanted to know how accurate the pedometer is. I… don't care. I exercised every day, which was the point; the numbers on the display were just the prompt.
Wait, no, I totally care. More about the precision than the accuracy, certainly, but I care: Lent is over, and I'm still wearing the thing. I appreciate the benefits of walking with the thin candy shell of my brain, of course. The dense meaty core, meanwhile, wants to watch the numbers go up. UP UP UP. And why not encourage it, given the outcome? It may not be spirit-of-the-law to walk in place while watching "Good Eats," for instance, but it's obviously better than watching TV while seated. If it's not terribly enlightened to walk for the numbers, rather than for walking's sake, it's nevertheless exercise. Considering a typical day in my working life only requires about 4,000 steps, I wind up taking 6,000 or so steps qua steps every day, which at my stride length is 2 miles (all 500,267 steps = 157 mi, and I totally did one of those strings of conversions from physics just because I could). Wearing a pedometer, in other words, shifted my lifestyle from sedentary to moderately active. Despite a lack of any physical changes, I'm calling that a clear improvement.
Why not apply the same desire to please the numbers to, say, counting calories? It would definitely be more effective from the health perspective, but I'm not interested. It's more difficult logistically; as far as I know, there are no flameless calorimeters that clip to your waistband. More importantly, it isn't positive. If I have a rough day at work and get home with a mere 2,500 steps to my name, I suck it up and take a longer walk than usual. Whereas if it's 6:30 and I've eaten 2,500 calories, I can either develop bulimia or promise to be better tomorrow. The latter is pointless, and the former is not something I want to encourage. Better still, it's impossible to be so sedentary in one hour that you wipe out the benefits of more active hours, yet it's more than possible to wipe out a week's careful dieting in 90 minutes. Since weight (and food, at least for me) is more than fraught enough without the kind of self-recrimination that inspires, I much prefer the clean accumulation of steps.
Good for me, then. What I need now is a Phase II. Weekdays I do my walking at night, which means I can't safely leave my neighborhood (no sidewalks, for starters); even during the day, walking alone means walking in populated areas. I'm not willing to make a habit out of driving to a place where I can walk, for ecological reasons, but there are only so many ways I can walk around my immediate environs. And while I could make special (car) trips on weekends, I'd really rather walk in parks, away from crowds and traffic. If I get murdered in the process, my mom will be furious (and worse, right), but if I want company/backup, I have to arrange it myself, and soon it'll be too hot anyway, and working out with tapes is kind of terrible, and waaaaaaaaah.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
1. Do you have this song? It's pretty great, even better than listening to me whine.
And while we're on the subject of avoidable delay, I faced a touch of the old choice paralysis with respect to this entry's title. You know I favor the quotations, but this time there are simply too many. "525,600 Paces"? "A journey of a thousand miles"? "So get on my side"1? There are dozens of possibilities - tweaked or untweaked - all of them bad. I went, as I generally do, for the hoariest. Try making that your mantra (just keep repeating it under your breath) and see if all kinds of interesting situations don't occur.
The experiment: back on Mardi Gras or perhaps the Monday before, I went to Sports Authority and bought new walking shoes and a pedometer. I aimed to walk 10,000 steps a day for the next 46 days (counting Sundays). The experiment thus took the form of a Lenten obligation, and if you're thinking, 'Since when does byelka58 observe Lent?', know this: I don't turn down free structure, regardless of the source. Lent is like the NaNoWriMo of behavior modification: more serious than a New Year's resolution, with a built-in sense of community. And a time limit! Plus, late winter/early spring is a very nice time to be walking in Atlanta. It's not too hot, not too cold, Orion is out, and various things are leafing and sprouting and chirping.
What you really want to know is whether I did it. The answer is: basically. 46 days x 10,000 steps = 460,000 steps, yes? And I took 500,267, or approximately 10,875 steps a day. Still, there were four days when I was under. The day of Jen's wedding I only clocked 2,439 (you'd think the pedometer would be invisible under an empire-waist dress, but it wasn't, so it stayed home). (On the other hand, the day before Easter I took 21,823.) At the beginning I told myself "no deals" - meaning I couldn't bank hours against future laziness, or make up missed hours later - so ethically I failed. Thank goodness for math, eh? My coworkers who got involved in the effort towards the end wanted to know how accurate the pedometer is. I… don't care. I exercised every day, which was the point; the numbers on the display were just the prompt.
Wait, no, I totally care. More about the precision than the accuracy, certainly, but I care: Lent is over, and I'm still wearing the thing. I appreciate the benefits of walking with the thin candy shell of my brain, of course. The dense meaty core, meanwhile, wants to watch the numbers go up. UP UP UP. And why not encourage it, given the outcome? It may not be spirit-of-the-law to walk in place while watching "Good Eats," for instance, but it's obviously better than watching TV while seated. If it's not terribly enlightened to walk for the numbers, rather than for walking's sake, it's nevertheless exercise. Considering a typical day in my working life only requires about 4,000 steps, I wind up taking 6,000 or so steps qua steps every day, which at my stride length is 2 miles (all 500,267 steps = 157 mi, and I totally did one of those strings of conversions from physics just because I could). Wearing a pedometer, in other words, shifted my lifestyle from sedentary to moderately active. Despite a lack of any physical changes, I'm calling that a clear improvement.
Why not apply the same desire to please the numbers to, say, counting calories? It would definitely be more effective from the health perspective, but I'm not interested. It's more difficult logistically; as far as I know, there are no flameless calorimeters that clip to your waistband. More importantly, it isn't positive. If I have a rough day at work and get home with a mere 2,500 steps to my name, I suck it up and take a longer walk than usual. Whereas if it's 6:30 and I've eaten 2,500 calories, I can either develop bulimia or promise to be better tomorrow. The latter is pointless, and the former is not something I want to encourage. Better still, it's impossible to be so sedentary in one hour that you wipe out the benefits of more active hours, yet it's more than possible to wipe out a week's careful dieting in 90 minutes. Since weight (and food, at least for me) is more than fraught enough without the kind of self-recrimination that inspires, I much prefer the clean accumulation of steps.
Good for me, then. What I need now is a Phase II. Weekdays I do my walking at night, which means I can't safely leave my neighborhood (no sidewalks, for starters); even during the day, walking alone means walking in populated areas. I'm not willing to make a habit out of driving to a place where I can walk, for ecological reasons, but there are only so many ways I can walk around my immediate environs. And while I could make special (car) trips on weekends, I'd really rather walk in parks, away from crowds and traffic. If I get murdered in the process, my mom will be furious (and worse, right), but if I want company/backup, I have to arrange it myself, and soon it'll be too hot anyway, and working out with tapes is kind of terrible, and waaaaaaaaah.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
1. Do you have this song? It's pretty great, even better than listening to me whine.