In order to maintain a healthy level of fitness, one should take around ten thousand steps each day. I bought a pedometer and decided I would track my progress over the course of a few days. The last time I did this I was working full-time, and averaged almost 20,000 steps a day, thanks to ridiculously long corridors, several flights of stairs, and a fairly physical job.
Life now is a little different. The children are picked up by a school bus which stops at the top of our street, and my office is just a few steps from my bedroom. But I have occasional client meetings in the centre of town, and I walk the dog for 45 minutes every morning, so surely 10,000 steps can’t be too much of a stretch?
But it is. The daily dog walk notches up 4,000 steps, but thereafter life is dangerously sedentary. If I’m working flat-out to meet deadlines, my only movement between 10am and 4pm is a jaunt downstairs to sneak a mini-babybel from the fridge and to make another cup of tea. I suppose I could add in a few more trips to the fridge, but I suspect that would be counter-productive. Interestingly, although a trot down the stairs earns me 15 steps, when I slipped on the top step recently and hurled myself to the bottom, the pedometer racked up a nifty 57. Still, I’m not sure it’s a viable exercise plan.
I worked out that to achieve 10,000 steps I would have to add in another dog walk and a couple of spins around the house while I eat my lunch. That’s all very well, but it lops yet another hour off my already short working day, making those deadlines even tougher to reach.
So I joined a class which meets on a Wednesday morning. It’s called ‘Cardio Assault’, which I think is a fitness euphemism for ‘heart attack in a village hall’. I sweat my way through an hour of gruelling exercises with manic enthusiasm, then wobble home and collapse on the sofa for the rest of the day. It’s now mid-afternoon and I’m unable to type because I’m quivering like a kicked whippet. I’d celebrate the number of steps I’ve achieved today, but the pedometer fell down the loo last week and now reads ERR when I try to turn it on. I think AGH would be more accurate.