Stepping to it is harder than you think

People in white lab coats believe walking 10,000 steps a day will significantly improve our health.

They haven’t mentioned what happens if you do more than that, but I’m hoping it’s not something terrible...

I tend to believe just about anything I see on TV and, from watching far too many scary episodes of Horizon, I came to the conclusion that I probably wasn’t walking enough.

Mind you, the number of walkers who get bashed over the head in ITV 9pm dramas is quite alarming, but it’s important to get things in perspective: Early heart attack, or moderate risk of getting brain caved in (possibly by David Tennant or Olivia Colman)?

Sure, I wander downstairs for breakfast, and then have to walk all the way out to the car to drive to work. I even have to get out in Ambleside to pick up a large cappuccino, and the staff car park must be a whole minute’s walk away from the office. I should probably be requesting company shoes.

But the doubt still remained. Was I getting the full 10K in? Probably close, I thought.

So I purchased a pedometer. It was pretty alarming, but I managed to install the battery eventually. I soon came to the conclusion that is must be faulty after wearing it all day (I even clipped it onto my underpants as soon as I came out of the shower in case I missed any paces out).

Less than 3000? In a whole day?

No. Way.

I checked the NHS website, which had this handy bit of advice: “Walking can be done almost anywhere, at any time, and in any weather. It's also a great way to get from A to B.” Really? Why did no-one ever mention this before? Good God – you mean you can actually use walking to get from one place... to another?! And at any time you like? That’s my mind blown.

Ignoring my somewhat footstep-free working days, I concluded that my weekend 5 mile walk would smash the 10,000 target a couple of times over. Nope.

However, walking to the shops and back, doing the weekend housework, putting a couple of hours in at the allotment, doing the 5 mile walk and all the other getting-from-A-to-B stuff that occurs, does. And some.

Having successfully achieved over 20,700 steps last Saturday, I found myself with several sensations taking place simultaneously 1) A sense of smug satisfaction 2) Crippling exhaustion 3) Footwear that can only be rendered safe by using fire.

With a bonus day off on Tuesday, I tried taking the long way round to the shops. I may have overdone it slightly, as it was 8.1 miles, and I lost an hour after falling asleep in the bath on my return.

Still, If I’m getting healthier, there just isn’t time for me to go to work any more if I want to keep my totals up. Shame, that.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday column" in the North West Evening Mail on the 23rd of May 2014. You can view it on their website here, where it was retitled slightly to "Stepping to it is hard work". The text was, unusually, left unchanged and unedited.

Last week's column eventually made it to the website too, so that's encouraging.

I do enjoy a good walk. I'm usually on my own nowadays, so listen to some tuneage on my trusty, tatty, HTC phone. I find myself unexpectedly pondering all sorts of stuff, whilst occasionally injuring myself, falling over, or getting startled by wildlife or other walkers I hadn't heard approaching through the sound of whatever my most recent musical purchases have been.

(Talking of which... My recent birthday saw the arrival of some new CDs, including the Remastered version of Mike Oldfield's 1984 masterpiece "Crises". One of of my favourite albums, and in the earliest stages of me getting a new album from someone I'd discovered I liked, rather that buying an older one. Happy days of musical discovery...)

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It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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