1 Million Steps to 2017

It is the time of the year when countdowns are the rage. The countdown to Halloween, when the spooks and candy collectors reign is only 24 days. Perhaps you like thanksgiving the time to feast, watch football and count your many blessings. For that you must wait 48 days. All the United States retailers have circled November 25th, which is Black Friday  and 49 days from today. Then the granddaddy of them all is the countdown to Christmas, which is now only 79 days away. Finally there is 92 days between October 1st and Deecember 31st.

But I want to introduce a new and different type of countdown. This one is related to my Fitbit that I have had since the first of February. I decided to motivate myself to get back to what I started in the spring with a new personal challenge. I want to log 1 million steps between October 1st and December 31st. That sounds like a monumental goal, but in fact it really is not.

Fitbit and other activity trackers are consistent in  providing you a target for fitness of at least 10,000 steps each day. While 10,000 steps can seem to be a tough goal you have to think about the quantity of steps you can collect just doing your daily activities. True you must increase some of your moving to get this, but the benefit is well worth it.

If you do the math 1,000,000 steps divided by 92 days from October 1st to January 1st of 2017 equates to 10,869 steps on average every day to reach the goal. This is day 7 of 92, but all I have counted so far is up through 6 days of my personal challenge. So far I have knocked out 53,216 steps of the 1 million, or an average of 10,643, just slightly below the pace I need. I have made more of a conscious effort to get up and get moving as I try to achieve this goal.

To achieve this I will need others to help keep me accountable and ask about my progress. I invite anyone who reads this to do just that, to ask about how it is going and to join me if you have a fitness tracker of your own. We can work on getting fit together.

I will be posting frequently to update the progress, so keep checking back to see how this adventure progresses.