19 January 2024
Dogged readers of this column might remember when, about a year ago, I remade my usual New Year’s resolution. “This year, I’ll walk more,” I told myself, writing a column about the appeal of wintertime sidewalks.
Looking back, how’d it go? My mileage may have varied. With some help from two pedometer apps, I have some results to share. It turns out it’s a lot easier to talk the talk than to walk the walk. Walking more is harder than it looks, unless, that is, you know about a few simple tricks.
The results
The good news for me is that I did walk more in 2023 than in the past few years. I hit 10,000 steps a day at least two dozen times. (Given that I did not always have my phone with me while chasing a toddler around the house, my data is likely underestimating the actual results. Also, my pedometer does not do a great job of measuring bike rides.)
On average, I hovered around 7,000 steps a day. For Americans anyway, that’s a decent outcome, but by international walking or public health standards, it’s disappointing. In general, looking at my step count data, a few patterns emerged.
The first is rather obvious. Minnesotans are much more active when it’s warm out. Despite my new New Year’s resolution, my step count was bleak for the first two months of 2023. After all, there was record snowfall! Despite valiant nordic ski outings, I averaged under 5,000 steps until March, pretty normal for most cold-weather denizens.
The other big pattern is working in an office is quite helpful. My step count spiked when I went back to work full-time in September, and stayed over 7,000 a day until the cold finally set in. Walking to and from the bus stop, over to a West Bank lunch spot, or across the Washington Avenue bridge between campuses is a big boost to walking.
The real benefit of the resolution, though, was a gentle internal nudge to seize more walking opportunities. If it was a nice day, I listened to that little voice inside my head nudging me along: Why don’t you walk instead? And I tried! But most of the time, that totemic 10,000-step goal remained elusive.
An arbitrary number?
If someone who thinks about walking all the time, intentionally moved close to a transit stop, and goes out of their way to walk more can’t achieve their goal, where does that leave the rest of us in the Twin Cities?
For one thing, it made me wonder whether 10,000 steps is really a realistic goal in the U.S. If I’m not meeting my target most days, someone who takes transit, has a relatively active profession, is this even a good target?
It turns out that the number itself, like a lot of long-time standards, is mostly arbitrary. (See also 2% inflation targets or the 85th% speed limit rule.) 10,000 has just always been the number that people used, and so it’s what gets used. Recent studies have interrogated this framing a bit more carefully, and it turns out that the health benefits of walking largely taper off after you get to about 8,000 steps.
While that made me feel better, even 8,000 remains a stretch for most Americans, myself included. The whole experience left me wondering about people who legitimately achieve 10,000 steps a day. What’s their secret? How do they do it? A few weeks ago, I reached out to readers and friends to find out.
One weird trick: Get a dog
For some people, getting to 10,000 is almost routine, and there are usually two reasons for this. For one group, it’s because they don’t own a car. Once you have no alternative, you find yourself walking a lot more than the average American.
Another group in the “unavoidable walking” category are folks with jobs on their feet. Someone waiting tables for five hours doesn’t need a exercise routines, and there are many such jobs that literally keep you on your toes. That includes nurses like Brent, servers like Billy or videographers like Matty, who gets most of his steps just during his everyday work rounds.
For folks with desk jobs and car keys, on the other hand, walking becomes a question of willpower. Even there, though, there are some life hacks that put you on the path to pedestrian progress. I had over two dozen replies to my query, and found some general patterns for walkaholics.
First, there were the runners and the workout people. If you’re a runner, I tip my cap. (I could never get into it.) Others turn to their gym routines, treadmill desks or, more scenic, a daily walk around a lake. That’s all well and good, but what I’m personally looking for are ways to incorporate steps into my everyday life without carving out distinct “exercise” tasks.
In that case, the two best tricks involve companions.
“Get a dog,” Nate told me.
Charlie, Bree, Mike and Ken chimed in with variations on this life hack: With a dog, you’ll walk more, whether you like it or not.
Granted, even there your mileage may vary. Small dogs like my friend Shirley’s Shi-Tzu walk much less than a husky that might happily take its owner on a Beargrease trek. But having a walking buddy genetically and biologically determined to go outside multiple times a day, one who is intoxicated by neighborhood scents, seems like the easiest way to wear out your shoe soles.
A more labor intensive option is to have a small child, one you can walk to school or day care. It’s a trick that works amazingly for many parents.
“My kids’ school is a half-mile away and we usually walk,” Laura Mitchell told me. “That’s 2 miles each day, and I try to add a 30 min walk + podcast to the walk home after I drop them off in the AM.”
This has the added bonus of giving you quality time with your child (and/or dog), along with a break from an otherwise hectic day. It’s no wonder that so many parents incorporate these walks into their routines.
“Walking the kids to school is about 1,200 steps round trip, so twice a day gets me a quarter of the way,” Chad Kulas told me. “Throw in a 30-40 minute dog walk and the usual daily steps like around the office and to meetings, and it can happen.”
Other than that, the best advice for walking more, as Elizabeth told me, is to simply “move to New York City.”
(I’ve tried that, and it’s quite expensive.)
Similarly, one reader, Forrest Fleishman, wrote in: “I’m on sabbatical in Barcelona, don’t own a car, and average 15,000 steps a day.”
It seems like so much depends on our environments. Living in some places, we walk a lot as part of our everyday life. In St. Paul, for the most part, it’s much harder. At any rate, I’m going to redouble my efforts this year. I’m not getting a dog, but I’ll try walking my daughter to day care more often, and see where it takes me.
Not today, though. It’s too cold out.