About the time we got a dog who likes to go for walks, I downloaded a pedometer on my phone. I was curious about how far different routes we take might be and I also wondered how many steps I take that aren't related to dog-walking. I can now tell you, for example, that playing 18 holes of golf, with a cart, seems to require around 4500 steps. If the dog and I walk north on 1st Avenue, east on 47th Street, south on Stevens, west on 49th, north on Garfield, and back home via 48th, that's about 3200 steps.
The app asks you to enter a per-day step goal. I entered 8500, only because I've heard that devoted walkers often shoot for 10,000 and I thought, well, 85 percent of "a lot" might be good for me. And it turns out to have been magically appropriate: not too much that I can't make it, not so little that I automatically get there every day. I usually check to see where I'm at while climbing the stairs to bed, and almost unfailingly it says something like 7,922 or 8,240. I'm Type A enough so that I'm not inclined to turn in when 8500 is that close, so I end up walking a kind of modified figure-8 around my bedroom till the bar turns green and lights flash. As I stroll about without going anywhere, in slavish devotion to achieving my wholly artificial "goal," the dog lays on the bed, like a normal creature, and considers the sights with what looks to me a lot like puzzlement, or maybe it's disdain.
Comments