A Step at a Time

I should be sleeping, with work coming up in a few hours, and I was. But I found myself wide awake, thinking about my sister Ann. I don't think I can adequately express how I am going miss her. So with sleep interrupted, I decided to update my blog.

My training for the Komen 3-Day is pretty easy right now. Basically, it is a lot of walking. I am supposed to be doing about three or four miles of walking four days a week, plus a day of cross training. I decided that I would start using my trusty Omron pedometer again, and keep track of my steps from three weeks ago until the event in 22 more weeks.

After three weeks, I have taken a quarter of a million steps, averaging nearly 12,000 steps every day. Of course, not all of that is doing my four walks each week. A lot of it is just incidental walking - going from the car to the office, moving around at work, going back to the car, and moving around home. I almost always take the stairs at work. I often walk to see someone instead of calling or email. I walk to the grocery store at home if I just have a few things to buy - it is a half mile each day. Do all of that enough, mix in a few three or four mile walks, or even a mile or two at lunch, and in three weeks, you put on 250,000 steps.

I'll probably update this every week or two, but so far, here is how my step count looks after three weeks (a week running Monday to Sunday, since the Komen walk ends on a Sunday):

Week 1: 83,040

Week 2: 80,855

Week 3: 86,453

In Team in Training, we say "changing lives a mile at a time," and I would guess that Komen must have a similar saying. But each of those miles is composed of steps, and I'll be taking a lot of them over the next 22 weeks!