Just a weird coincidence I assume

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m 68 and retired, and because of concern about my memory, my neurologist suggested I do some daily cardio. I live in NW Montana, so there are lots of trails, roads, and paths, and since I have a dog that needs walking, I got into walking/hiking multiple times a day.

Some days, I would walk 6 miles, and other days, 12 miles. I know how many miles I walk because I have an app that tracks my steps and miles, and I put that into a spreadsheet. My goal was to walk every day unless I was too sick, which was rare.

I was proud of how well I did in 2021, but I hadn’t looked back at that data until today. There is no set pattern to where I go on any given day. I take the dog out first thing in the morning, have a second walk in the afternoon, and the third walk after dinner. In winter, it gets dark early, so I rely on my treadmill instead of walking outside.

I just totaled my results for 2022. I averaged 8.5 miles daily and walked 7,718,622 steps or 3100.78 miles for the year. Just out of curiosity, I pulled out my 2021 spreadsheet. In 2021, I averaged 8.49 miles daily and walked 7,716,502 steps or 3,099.93 miles.

The difference between the two years is unbelievably tiny. Over the year, I walked 2,120 more steps in 2022 than in 2021, which is equal to .85 miles difference. What are the odds of that happening?

Even if I tried to make the numbers match up, which I didn’t, I don’t think I could have gotten nearly that close. I guess it’s just a weird cosmic coincidence. I don’t have any other explanation.

2

Has all that walking done anything to improve your memory, though? Is that a real thing, cardio to improve memory?

3

Have you tried to add other one year intervals and see whether they are also nearly constant? You have Jan-Dec twice, what about Mar-Apr, Jul-Jun, Oct-Nov, etc.? You could even plot those results on a spreadsheet.

4

The difficulty with getting your head around this kind of weird coincidence is to figure out just how unlikely it really is given all the possible “similar” things in your life that had the potential to generate a similarly surprising coincidence. And when you’re doing that retrospectively, it’s tricky to say what the set of “similar” things really is. There are many things a person’s life that involve numbers repeating in some way periodically. You might notice that your grocery bill for a large shop involving a diversity of items this week is exactly the same as last week, etc. etc. But there are also things that don’t involve numbers in quite the same way. What if the time of day or date of two events turned out by coincidence to be exactly the same? That might be equally surprising to you, so should that kind of thing also be included in the universe of all things in your life that have the potential to be “similar” weird coincidences? And how long a time period should we consider - a year, or your whole life? What compounds the difficulty is that from your perspective, this is more of a weird coincidence than from mine. Because from my perspective, anyone could have posted this, so it seems like my universe of of things that could have popped up as potential weird coincidences is larger than yours.

The only way to get a rigorous probability is to specify the set of possible things under consideration that will be the denominator of the probability beforehand.

There’s a somewhat analogous weird problem in modern cosmology. With eternal inflation multiverse theories, nobody can figure out what the denominator of the probability should be to work out how unlikely any given type of universe really is.

5

Who cares about whether it is weird to have such a coincidence…that’s a solid amount of walking to log. What an awesome achievement!

I hope that I will have such energy and function when I reach your age!

6

My take is thus -
You walk your pupper 3 times per day and probably take a moderately similar route each time [you may go north in the morning, east in the noon and west in the evening walkies. People are creatures of habit] You also probably walk about the same amount of time each time [and even on those days you resort to the treadmill] and people tend to use the same pace all the time. [and it was annoying when I walked with mrAru as he was brainwashed by the military to always march/walk in step with whomever was next to him unless crossing a bridge, I hate feeling like I am in lockstep with others.]

So it really isn’t surprising you tended to have close to the same numbers when comparing times of day and days of the week.

7

The answer for me is yes. My memory has markedly improved over the past two years.The issue was data retrieval, not insufficient storage. IOW, the memory was in my brain, but my ability to access it quickly wasn’t functioning well, and while this is a common issue for older folks, baseline cognitive testing I had done two years ago showed it was an issue for me. I learned from various doctors and other sources, increased blood in the brain helps with cognitive functions, including memory.

There was another change that may have contributed to my memory improvement. For at least the past 10 years I’ve suffered from Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH), which meant I was getting up 3-5 times a night to pee. (It came on gradually, and I thought it was normal for someone my age.) When I mentioned it to my PCP he referred me to a Urologist who diagnosed BPH and prescribed me Tamsulosin. The problem went away, and since then I have been sleeping through the night 95% of the time. Good quality sleep has been proven to help with overall brain function, including memory.

So whether it was the cardio or improved sleep that improved my memory I can’t say, but my guess is that it was a combination. When I am retested in two years we’ll see if my memory retrieval really has improved or not.

8

Thanks, mino7flat5. For me it was about getting into the habit of walking every day, and being retired meant there was nothing stopping me. I started small, 6,000 steps a day, and slowly worked up to 15,000 steps a day, and then 25,000 steps a day, which is exactly 10 miles for me.

Once it becomes a habit, you no longer have to think about it, or plan for it. It’s just a part of your daily activities. Having a dog also made it easy since he had to go out every day and that was another excuse for walking.

9

Habit is right. I run 30mi / week, typically running 6 or 7mi every day after work. This has been a habit for decades. That takes enough time as it is, so I am doubly impressed that not only is your distance per day greater, but you do it walking–that must be a significant portion of your day.

I’m 55 now. One of my greatest fears is that something bad will happen in my sixties that would keep me from running.

It is encouraging to think that even if I weren’t able to run, I could possibly get in the same amount of workout by walking! I’ll say it again–I will be very happy if I can do what you do when I’m your age.

10

I happen to track my stats quarterly in my spreadsheet. Below is the data for average monthly steps for 2021 and 2022 by quarter. As you can see, not that much similarity between the two years, other than the predictable drop in Q3 when the weather is hot and I spend most of the day out on the boat not walking.

2021

Q1 - 21,986
Q2 - 22,787
Q3 - 17,490
Q4 - 22,304

2022

Q1 - 25,474
Q2 - 22,560
Q3 - 19,824
Q4 - 16,835

11

Yep, now it really looks like a coincidence.

12

Running is too hard on my legs, and running with a dog on a leash is challenging, or biking for that matter. Walking and hiking in the mountains is really my best option for a variety of reasons. Hopefully I can keep doing it until the day I drop dead.

My usual pace is 2 miles in 45 minutes, 2.666 mile per hour, so to walk 12 miles I need to walk for 4.5 hours, which is a lot of walking time, but since I write it gives me time to work through plot problems without sitting at my office desk staring at my computer screen for the same amount of time.

13

That was my my first thought, but the amount of walking/hiking I do a day is is extremely random, and depends on things like the weather and other priorities for the day. It’s like flipping a coin. Do I walk 6 miles today, 12 miles, or something in between. There is no way to predict, and no pattern that I can discern. So it’s just pure coincidence that the overall data agrees for these past two years.

14

Ahh, but something else is guiding your results: consistency. While your daily walks may vary in length, and any given week may be different from the next, over the long haul it evens-out due to your consistent habit. Like you say, once an activity becomes a habit, its becomes much easier to just keep doing it, and hard to stop. And if you do stop for some reason on any given day, you probably feel like you should be doing it, like you are missing out on something. Right? You are just a very consistent person.

Look at other parts of your life. How similar are all the cars you’ve ever owned? The type of mate you’ve dated, and married? Do you have kids - are they all boys or girls?

15

Yes, I’m hyper-consistent about most things and resist change. I always buy a truck for myself even though I don’t really need one, and if I get distracted during the morning, I always take an extra long walk in the afternoon.

Walking is a habit I just can’t shake, which for me is a good thing. My average is 8.5 miles a day, but I rarely do less than 8 or more than 10. So I think consistency is the key to why it’s roughly the same every year… but it doesn’t explain how the last two years could be almost identical in total miles. That’s just a strange coincidence. I’ll report back what happens in 2023. Stay tuned.

16

Well we’ve had this pandemic going on the past two years, so perhaps that limited other ways to spend your time and sort-of shoe-horned you into walking above all else.

17

Now you mention it, my primary source of exercise at the time was bowling three times a week and the pandemic put an end to that. At around the same time my neurologist suggested I walk a few miles daily to improve my memory. Alzheimer’s Disease runs in my family, and a DNA test showed I had the APOE4 allele times two (homozygous), so my chances of AD are much greater than the average person, at least according to one study.