CARE Walk in her shoes challenge: Day 4

My feet hurt! The blisters I thought had settled down from a few weeks ago are rubbing again and I don’t like it.

I might try some different shoes for the next day or so.

I’m now more than half way through the challenge and have met my step target every day. Someone at work asked me today what I was doing to get to 25,000 steps a day.

Here are some of the things I’ve been doing:

• Getting up at an obscenely early hour and going for a walk. This is my fast walk for the day where I try to maintain a 6 km/hour pace. (As I said yesterday I don’t know what a normal walking pace is, but this is a stretch for me – just out of my comfort zone.) Depending on the day, this is either an hour (6 km) or about 40 minutes (4 km). It’s about 6,000 to 8,000 steps.

• Walking from Juniordwarf’s school to walk. I’m not sure how far this is, but it can take anywhere up to 30-40 minutes depending on which way I go and what I need to do on the way. Most days I walk back to school to pick him up as well.

• Incidental walking during the day. This does add up. Try and go a slightly longer way somewhere – around the whole block instead of straight up the street. Leave the washing in the basket and take 3 or 4 trips to put it away instead of taking the basket to the wardrobe. Follow an 8-year-old around for a while. Just find opportunities to move when you otherwise wouldn’t.

• The Exertime program on my computer at work reminds me to get up and do something every hour. Mostly I choose the ‘walk’ option. It’s about 150 steps round trip to the kitchen to get a glass of water and back to my desk. That adds up over the day.

• Taking the stairs instead of the lift at work. Hahahahahaha. No.

• Going out at lunch time. Even strolling around the shops for 30 to 40 minutes (which I said I wasn’t going to do) adds quite a few steps to my total. Going for a walk would be better, but I’ve had things I needed to do at lunch time.

• On the day I work at home, I finish work at 1.00 so I’ve been going for walks for about an hour (or more this week) to make up for not having walked to work.

• A quick 20-30 minute walk when I get home. You know, instead of collapsing on the couch and going on Twitter. Because I would never do that. Not much. Maybe sometimes. Maybe there’s time to do both . . . (Probably about 4,000 steps.)

• Walking after dinner until my Fitbit buzzes to tell me I’ve reached my goal. Then walking a bit more as a buffer in case I don’t make it to the goal on another day. This is about 20-40 minutes, depending on how many more steps I need to do. This is about 1.5 to 4 km, depending on how fast I want to walk. (Not very at that time of night.)

I’ve been finding that there are lots of opportunities to increase the amount I move. Sometimes it’s as simple as just realising I have a few minutes when nothing much is happening and there’s nothing I actually have to do right then, and going outside for a walk around the block.

Finally . . .

Today’s leggings.

I forgot to take a picture of Zoe while we were walking, but she helped me write this post.