Walk A Mile In My Shoes

... by 8AM, apparently.

I've often wondered just how far I walk in a day, especially those days when I'm out hiking for hours on end in the woods looking for caches.  GPS-based apps like MapMyRun work well, but they burn a lot of phone battery life, and if I'm away from a power source for hours on end I need to conserve my phone battery.  It turned out that Himself had a pedometer at work that he wasn't using--a freebie from the company health services or some such--and he brought it home for me.  Of course, it just measures number of steps taken, not distance, and there is a bit of wiggle room in its accuracy, but as a rough indicator it works fine and gives me some idea of where I am relative to the 10,000-step days that are apparently a standard goal.

I've messed around with it a little and it seems to be reasonably accurate, but I'd never managed to remember to wear it for a full day before.  I grabbed it from my nightstand around 6:30 this morning when I got up and clipped it to the waistband of my PJ pants.  By the time the kids got on the bus at 8:10, the device was registering more than 1000 steps!  

Later in the day, I took the dog for a walk, a lap of the walking trail at a nearby park that happens to measure just about exactly one mile. For giggles, I looked at the pedometer as I started and stopped the lap and noticed that this lap took me a little over 1000 steps as well.  Hard to believe that I could be walking the better part of a mile inside my house while cooking breakfast and getting the kids ready for school, but such appears to be the case...crazy.  And the daily total: north of 16,000 steps and still climbing since I haven't gone to bed yet.  Sedentary, I am not!