Fitness

On the Move

Tales of a Fitbit Obsessive

fitbit-statsEveryone in our family has a Fitbit. The Assistant enjoys the fact that school recesses and P.E. classes always kept him at the top of the family leaderboard.

The Husband’s coworkers decided to implement a Workweek Challenge. That’s where you compete against a select crew of invitees for 5-day totals. And one of them invited The Assistant.

I have no words for the level of obsessiveness that this has inspired in my child. This is a kid who is largely noncompetitive when pitted against other kids. But give him a bunch of adults, and he rises to the occasion. He’s found his people.

The first week, he lost by a very slim margin. This would not do. Not at all. So the next week, we walked. We walked everywhere, all the time. We took the long way. We walked to dinner each night while The Husband was away on business. He carefully calculated how far we could walk and still be home in time for bedtime.

In the end, he crushed the competition. See that 95,881 to the right? That’s The Assistant. (Names have been hidden to protect the innocent.) I’m in second place. The guy that he was trying to beat came in at a respectable 62,199, but that’s still 33,000 less than what The Assistant managed.

How far is that? Well, the statistic for adults is roughly 2,000 steps per mile. Having tested out The Assistant’s stride length against mine, he takes about 20% more steps to cover the same distance, so 2,200 steps.

We've also been hiking up some really large hills.

We’ve also been hiking up some really large hills.

92,881 steps divided by 2,200 steps per mile = 43.58 miles. In 5 days. That’s 8.7 miles per day.

Let me tell you, he slept really well that Friday night.

I’m actually liking all of this walking, though. I may feel a bit guilty about taking time out of my day to go for a run, but I don’t feel the least bit guilty about walking my kid to or from school. And when you’re racking up more than 30 miles a week in walking, it definitely helps maintain a level of fitness that I don’t typically stick with after half marathon season ends.

But that got me thinking: what do other people do when they’re not training for races? Do you run in the offseason? How do you maintain fitness when you’re not in training mode?

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