ten thousand steps

I don't think I reached my ten thousand steps today.   It drizzled and spotted with rain all morning, and while I got out into the garden in the afternoon it was too dark to see what I was pulling up or treading on by a quarter to four.

I don't actually have any idea how many steps I take, since I don't possess a Fitbit or any other fitness tracker.  I yelped with laughter at David Sedaris' account of his adventures with a Fitbit, but afterwards felt even less inclined to own one than I had before.  I'm not sure I want to take something as simple and pleasant as moving about and turn it into a target.  I'm left deeply sceptical about fitness trackers by the reports showing divergence of up to thirty per cent by different trackers measuring exactly the same day's worth of activity.  I don't suppose it could cope with measuring crawling about and standing up and getting down a lot.  I don't particularly want to share my personal and medical data with the makers of fitness trackers.  I can think of lots more amusing ways of spending fifty or a hundred quid.  I expect there are some more reasons, but that'll do for starters.

Out of interest I counted the steps to the post box when I walked up to post a letter yesterday morning, or rather, I lost track of the number of hundreds I'd notched up on the way there and counted the steps back, curling up a finger at each passing hundred.  I can see why rosary beads came in useful, trying to keep track of all those Hail Marys.  It's around six hundred paces from our front door to the post box, presumably fewer if you're taller, so the round trip of twelve hundred steps was equivalent to roughly an eighth of all the movement I needed to do all day.  That didn't seem very demanding, since it doesn't take long to walk to the post box.

From the front door to the bottom of the garden is a hundred steps, give or take, so that's another two per cent of the daily target each time I get as far as the ditch bed and realise I've forgotten my bucket or left my secateurs in the hall.  It's about seventy from the front door to the compost bin, so emptying the green waste caddy to make space for tonight's potato peelings added another 1.4 per cent.  I haven't been up to the beehives in the last couple of days to count the steps, but it must be at least twice as far as it is to the bottom of the garden.  I could be pushing ten per cent of my daily target just doing the bees, as soon as I needed to do any to-ing and fro-ing with equipment.

The Systems Administrator does not have a Fitbit either, and is not getting one for Christmas, but thought that ten thousand steps sounded a lot.  Expressed as the time you would need to spend going for a brisk walk it does sound quite a lot, as we worked it out to be around an hour and a half.  Anyone with a full time job and a commute would be hard pressed to fit in an hour and half's walk seven days a week.  But as I understand it the ten thousand includes all steps, including simply moving around your own house or office, which could come to as much as five thousand, leaving only five thousand extra or four trips to the post box to get to ten.  Though if you are David Sedaris the ten thousand target doesn't stand for long before you start upping it.

If you carry stuff while walking I'm sure that should count as extra.  A hundred steps uphill to the compost heap carrying a builder's bucket full of wet leaves has to be worth more than a gentle unladen stroll on the flat.  Anyway, I am still not going to get a Fitbit.  As long as I keep on gardening and wandering about outside when it's not raining that should be enough exercise.