Mar 20, 2009

One year with pedometer


It was a year ago this morning that I first clipped on my Walkabout pedometer. 365 times since then when I've noted my daily step count. Probably thousands of times I've been reassured to hear it quietly clicking away at my hip as I went about my daily business. It's funny how the pedometer changed my habits; I became happy to take detours, happy to have the bus drop me off a distance from where I wanted to go, and *almost* happy to be the one to have to pick up groceries. Almost.

There's something funny about human nature - well, mine anyhow - that the simple act of measuring progress is such a powerful motivator. I wanted to walk more, sure, but once the website was graphing my progress, I really wanted to nudge that red line higher. In fact, once I formed an online group with friends and family, I took unseemly joy from long walks because I knew this could make me "win" today. It was only gradually that I (re)discovered that walking was fun for other reasons. And on the raniest or coldest days, it was only the competition that kept me walking at all. Is this a bad thing?

Along the way, of course, I made other discoveries, some more profound than the power of competition and self-measurement. I'll blog about those another day. Today I want to rejoice in my personal accomplishment over the past year.














I walked the distance to Regina.

Next year's goal?

No comments:

Post a Comment