My company is pushing health, so they bought FitBits for everyone who wanted one, and give an entry into a drawing for a gift card for people who average 5000, 10k or 15k steps a day each quarter. Being miserably out of shape I have been doing it for a couple months now since early spring. Now walking isn’t the most exiciting activity, and I have memorized every comedy album I have downloaded(Reminds me I need to start a thread on some new good long cheap comedy albums to download, cause I’m just tired of music lately)
But anyway I spend a lot of time walking around my neighborhood, and have memorized every square of sidewalk within a mile of my house. So I walk around thinking about what path I feel like taking that day, and how far it is.
Today someone driving stopped and asked me for directions to a park. It wasn’t until after they left I realized I gave directions of the form “Ohh no problem, just go 1200 steps back that way, take a right, and go 1600 more steps, and it will be on the right.” :smack:
Our company does the same thing. One of my colleagues puts the FitBit on his kids, who do a lot of running around…
I pulled off the “Fitbit” sticker on my company supplied device and it read, “DroneTracker 4000.”
Job well done I say. I do the Global Corporate Challenge every year so I would have known just how far you meant by those directions, and it’s always good to have an idea of the distance when receiving directions. I think your listener may have been in a similar position and thus didn’t feel the need to query your interesting directions.
Audiobooks. If it helps the transition, start with audiobooks by comedians.
And podcasts.
Just go down to the hardware store and strap it to the paint shaker for an afternoon.
I have Plantar Fasciitis, and cannot walk some days. I became annoyed because I couldn’t get the healthcare discounts offered for X-number of pedometer steps. So I affixed it to my chihuahua’s collar and chuckled while watching the totals ratchet up. Sadly, my diabolical scheme had a flaw. One day I noticed it was no longer on her collar, and I still haven’t found it.
I don’t know about the FitBit, but the (Garmin) VivoFit is ‘smart’ & adjusts your targeted step count based upon recent history.
Go running for a couple of days & your targeted step count goes up so that the day you take off & don’t run you not only don’t meet your target, but you’ve done a lesser percentage of your target than the day last week when you took the exact same number of steps. The inverse is also true, don’t run for a few days & your targeted step count goes down so that when you do a run on the weekend you’re now at 150 or 200% of goal.
“1 million steps today, Mr. Jeffries?”
“Oh yes, definitely over a million.”
“Quite the walker aren’t you, Mr. Jeffries?”
“Yep yep, gots the happy feet.”
The average man’s pace is damn near a yard*, so if you just train yourself to say ‘yards’ rather than ‘steps’ you’ll be fine.
*Most sources say 30 inches, 2.5 feet so 16% short of a yard, which is near enough for casual directions. And 2.5 feet seems pretty short for me.
Seconded. If you do a search, there are multiple ‘recommend me a podcast threads’.
It would be worse if you interrupted yourself to say “recalculating…recalculating…”
2000 steps to a mile is a rough approximation. My wife has a FitBit and I have a fancy Garmin GPS watch. When we do things like walking half marathons, she had about 2100 steps per mile and she’s on the short side.
I guess I must take very small steps. A thirty inch stride feels extremely awkward, and I’m 5-10 ish. I just measured and my natural steps even at a going-somewhere pace are right around 20 inches toe-to-toe. I guess I’m going to be obsessively watching people walk for a while I guess. I’ve been walking next to people my whole life and never noticed that I am taking more steps than average, in fact I had always thought that most people had a fairly short stride. I’m really weirded out at the revelation actually.