Miles for the Last Two Weeks

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to count my steps again using my trusty Omron pedometer. I have a good idea of how many training miles I do each week, but was curious about the total mileage. I am measuring this from Friday to Thursday, and here they are for the last two weeks:

Seven days ending Thursday, January 15: Total miles: 51.7; training miles: 28.0
Seven days ending Thursday, January 22: Total miles: 45.2; training miles: 26.4

As mentioned in my last post, I missed 7 miles of training on Wednesday, thus my miles were lower than they should have been this week. But it is an indication of how just routine walking and moving can add a lot of miles to one’s actual training miles.

I determined my stride length for walking long ago, and measured it for running a few weeks ago. My running stride is slightly longer. My pedometer tracks “aerobic steps”, meaning continuous running or walking for 10 minutes or more. I estimate what percentage of my training on a given day was running, and can then compute an average stride length for the aerobic steps that day.

My non-aerobic steps are always going to be walking – from parking to work, up and down stairs, around the office, around the house, maybe a short walk at lunch on an errand. I could use my stride length for walking, but that would over-estimate the miles, because going up and down stairs, and short trips in the office or home are going to be a shorter stride that 36 inches. So I use 30 inches as a good average.

Therefore my steps can easily be converted to an estimate of miles for the week that I believe is within a few percentage points one way or the other of being accurate.