This is my pedometer.
My close friend and hated enemy for the last 100 days. We’ve gone through the joys of reaching new personal bests. The disappointments when my daily step count has been so low that it’s screaming at me to do more. Even going to sleep in bed with it sometimes accidentally!
Back in May this year, my workplace signed up to be part of the Global Corporate Challenge – basically a workplace fitness and health program with 2 main aims – get employees fit and healthy, and raise money for some charities (The Iganga Babies Home – http://igangababies.org/ and the Foundation for Chronic Disease Prevention – http://www.chronicdiseaseprevention.org/).
Entry money was covered by my work, so the real personal challenge was doing at least 10,000 steps everyday for 16 weeks. Whoa… at the start I thought that this would not be possible. My job is in the IT industry – sitting at the desk for practically the whole day. I reckon days could go by and I wouldn’t do walk more than 3,000 steps. So to get to 10,000 would mean I’d have to do something… each and every day. And to do it for nearly 4 months! 1 month I could probably adjust temporarily for… but for 4 months, this is almost like they want this to really change daily habits!
Well, a few of us signed up in our group here, and we started really enthusiastically. Instead of sitting at our desks for lunch, we actually went out and walked. It was liberating getting out of the office. I joined a local cycling club and started doing rides every Saturday morning so that I could relax my step count for the rest of the week. But unfortunately, lately our team has been hit by a few travel trips, a few cases of the cold, rainy weather – and my average and the team’s average has dropped.
Being an engineer, I started to take note of routes and how many steps I would do on each. Nothing like being able to get out for a quick 15 minute walk and raking up a couple of thousand steps 🙂
And of course, the computer nerd in me meant that I had to create a spreadsheet where I tracked steps, cycling kms, and so on. Even down to how many kms I’d need to cycle to catch the next team ahead of us.
Now we’re 2 weeks from the end and my average is currently 15,466 steps. Not bad, but it has dropped since I started when it was hovering around 17,000 steps.
But the great news is that the consistent exercise and getting out on the bike combined with eating less has resulted in weight loss!
Now I’m on my 100th day with less than 2 weeks to go. I was looking forward to the freedom of not having to clip on the pedometer one morning, but the fitness bug in me has decided to sign up for another work fitness challenge – another month of wearing the pedometer!
One guy, three girls... 