About a year and a half ago, I became one of those people who keeps track of how many steps they walk every day. I know there’s nothing magical about the daily goal of 10,000 steps, but it’s a fun pastime, made even more fun by the fact that most days I exceed 10,000 without really trying.
That’s because I live in Manhattan, with a dog to walk, errands to run, and a commute that usually consists of a subway ride and then a walk through Central Park, or a bike ride usually through the park, which involves I occasionally go slow enough that the steps app on my phone thinks I’m running. (It also doesn’t hurt that the nearest coffee here at Bloomberg’s New York headquarters is half a block from my desk.)
Outside of home, it has proven much more difficult to reach 10,000. There have been exceptions, such as visits to San Francisco and Mexico City, where I walked even more than normal in New York. But stays in rural Vermont and California, the suburbs of San Francisco and Washington, and the islands of Hawaii and Oahu have all brought down my average (10,506 steps per day since I started; 11,300 in the past year).
