Ten Thousand Steps

For years we have heard that taking ten thousand steps every day will make you healthier. And you don't need special clothing, footwear, or equipment. You can do your walking barefoot or in three-inch heels, in shorts or bespoke suits, up a mountain or in your kitchen. The principle has a pleasing Japanese-style simplicity about it, like those exquisite, barely-there flower arrangements. If I bring up Japan, it's because that is where the 10,000-step movement began.

It's a part of my "shadow self" that I can't seem to shake, the tendency to glom onto goals, regardless of their worth. Ten thousand steps--is there a number more absolute, majestic and compelling than that slender digit trailing four plump zeroes? Who could resist it? Not I.

But for a long time I couldn't find a pedometer (did I mention that you need a pedometer?) that counted steps accurately. Then recently I heard about a new generation of battery-powered gizmos that were supposed to do the job. I bought one, measured my stride as instructed, told it my height and weight, and clipped it to my waistband. Then I took Bisou for a walk.

I had no idea what I would find when I checked the count at bedtime. Would the day's harvest yield five hundred or five thousand steps? As it turned out, it was the latter. Not bad, for a baseline, but I was only halfway to my goal.

For the next couple of days I took Bisou for longer walks. In the evening, while watching TV, I set a kitchen timer for twenty-five minute periods, and each time it rang I got up and walked three times around the room. Every night the number on my pedometer grew. On Friday, it showed eight thousand steps.  On Saturday, I did it again.

On Sunday, I couldn't get out of bed.

On Monday, I was hobbling stiff-kneed around the kitchen when I heard a story on NPR that was sent to me personally by the universe. It turns out that the goal of 10,000 steps is not based on any kind of scientific evidence. It was promulgated in Japan decades ago by a pedometer manufacturer who wanted to sell more pedometers.

Now, a study of 17,000 women of a certain age shows that walking a mere 4,400 steps a day had a beneficial effect on the women's longevity. Some ambitious participants walked more, but after 7,500 steps there were no additional effects on longevity (possibly because their painful knees drove them to suicide).

Since hearing that story, I have abandoned my obsession with the 10,000 steps. I am not abandoning my pedometer, however, even though the numbers 4,400 or even 7,500 don’t have the same appeal. I have settled for a measly five thousand steps a day. My knees are already thanking me.

And when the next fitness craze hits, whether it be daily push-ups, jumping jacks, or handstands, I will strive to keep in mind the common sense views of my mother, who lived into her nineties without the aid of canes, walkers, joint replacements, or NSAIDs. She walked every day, making circuits inside the house when the weather was bad, but only for as long as she enjoyed it. 

She would have laughed at my pedometer. "Why do you need a little machine," I can hear her saying, "to tell you when you've had enough?"

Every Step Counts

The pared-down new look of My Green Vermont comes from artist/graphic designer/herbalist/gardener/wise woman and friend, Dona Mara.  Check out her website:  http://www.artistseyestudio.com/donapage.html  When the makeover is complete and I have figured out the logistics, I will celebrate by giving away an original drawing for one of  the blog illustrations.  Stay tuned.

Now, for today's post:

I believe in the power of walking.  All I have to do is look at the women in my family, starting with my father's tiny mother who, dressed in black and in high heels, toddled all over the streets of Barcelona until she died in her nineties. Today my four aunts, now into their late 80s and 90s, are still striding down those same streets, on their daily rounds to the baker, the supermarket, and the concert hall.  My disabled 95-year-old mother, who nevertheless endures with perfect vitals, in her  mobile years clocked hundreds of miles inside her air-conditioned house in the sweltering American South.

Alas, where I live, the nearest market, cafe, bookstore and movie theater are all miles away.  It is theoretically possible for me to get along with no walking at all, so I have to make a point of integrating this most basic of human activities into my day.  

Ever since the Japanese propounded "ten thousand steps a day" as the key to immortality, I have loved pedometers.  Unfortunately, pedometers are designed to clip onto a belt, and right away if you are a woman there is a problem, because you don't always wear a belt. You can clip the pedometer to the waistband of your pants but, depending on the fit, it will count either too many or, more often, way too few steps.

When you wear a dress, you can clip the pedometer to a regular leather belt, worn under the dress and next to the skin, and grit your teeth at the discomfort.  Even worse, if you bend in certain ways the pedometer can slip off and fall to the floor, and never live to count another step.

Last week I decided to give my pedometer another chance.  But first I went online and bought a pedometer belt.  It is an elastic, adjustable belt with a flat snap buckle, and much more comfortable than the leather version.

Nevertheless, it is still accident-prone.  As I was sitting down to dinner at someone's house the other night the pedometer popped off the belt and landed on my lap.  There was nowhere to hide it, so I spread the napkin over my thighs, discreetly hiked up my tunic, and clipped it back on. I have since invented a simple thread loop which keeps the pedometer attached to the belt.

Now, I count every step.  I racked up 2,000 during a single phone conversation.  My yoga class, disappointingly, yielded only 100 steps--the pedometer was not impressed by all those down dogs and sleeping pigeons. I wear my pedometer every minute of the day, walking up and down as I brush my teeth before going to bed, when I check the count one last time.  In the morning, I snap the belt around my waist before even putting my feet on the floor.

It's been raining all day, and so far I'm just over 2,000 steps.  A picture flashes in my mind of monks reading their breviary while walking around the cloister.  I have a Trollope novel on my Kindle.  Maybe I can get used to reading it while walking around the house.

Death Of A Gym: Repercussions

Today my husband and I got into our mud-spattered truck and went shopping for fitness equipment. With the nearby gym recently deceased, and the roads around here icy, snowy, muddy or wet for most of the year, we figured it made sense to get a machine that would provide us a way to burn calories other than gardening, building wattle fences, or walking to the mailbox.

Thinking that we should try out anything we were considering buying, we headed to Glens Falls, NY, a city that would strike most Americans as perfectly ordinary. But after five years in Vermont, a place like Glens Falls feels to me like another country, if not another planet.

There is so much one forgets, as a citizen of West Pawlet. The six-lane highways cutting through suburbia. The bigness of the big stores, which in turn have other big stores next to them, which together form a shopping center, whose twin you can see across the road as you search for a shady spot in the frying pan that is the parking lot (we had Bisou in the truck). The fact that you can drive three minutes and see two McDonalds. The nurseries as big as cow pastures (if they are so huge and so numerous, why isn't America greener?). The long waits at the traffic lights.

One criterion we used to help us sift through the thousands of fitness machines out there is size. Unlike me, who believe in going into a meditative state and listening to my body while I exercise, my husband believes in watching TV, so as not to have to listen to his body. We are so quaint that we have only one TV in the house, and it is in a small room already crowded with three sets of bookshelves holding such items as the record player my husband put together from a kit in 1970, his LP collection, two decades' worth of videotapes, and (I just counted them) eight remotes. So the fitness apparatus had to be, first and foremost, relatively small.

We started with the most upscale of the stores we planned to visit--Sears (did I mention that we are from W. Pawlet?). And there we saw treadmills so huge that you could land a jumbo jet on them, whose control panels reminded me of my rare glimpses into pilots' cabins. The elliptical trainers took up somewhat less space, but we still couldn't imagine one of those behemoths in our TV room. That left the exercise bikes. They, like the rest of America, had also put on weight since we bought our first one years ago. But they didn't have as many electronic gizmos (as a creative person, I can invent my own workouts, thank you) and one had movable handles, so you could exercise your arms as well as your legs. The nice salesman even pulled it out onto the floor and let us try it.

We next headed to the two other nearby stores that carried exercise equipment: W, and K (need I spell out their names?). Same huge shade-free parking lots. Same aisles broader than the streets of Barcelona's Gothic Quarter. Same huge people (non-assiduous users of home fitness equipment) pushing overflowing carts. But neither store allowed us to try out their machines.

After a fattening lunch at the only non-fast-food place we could find we returned to Sears. There, I hid myself in the women's clothing area while my husband, who came of age among the chickpea vendors in the bazaars of Abadan, Iran, negotiated with the Italian salesman. After allowing a sufficient interval for them to come to an agreement, I appeared in time to witness the signing of the credit card and graciously receive the salesman's congratulations.

After we loaded the bicycle on the truck we found Bisou an island of grass among all the oceans of asphalt and let her out, then put her back in her crate and headed home. And it was like watching a film in reverse: as the road narrowed lane by lane the stores got smaller, the traffic lighter. Soon pastures with cows replaced parking lots, and I knew we were home.

Do the last couple of sentences sound overly idyllic? Probably. Do I miss being able to wander idly through a store, looking at stuff, sometimes? Absolutely. Am I married to an Iranian? No.