My Feet Hurt
on September 16, 2009
I knew it would be a matter of time before the novelty of this little device wore off. I dropped it on the floor before I could get a good look at it. I do stuff like that.
It came around noon and I had to try it out immediately. I logged a few hundred steps around the office. This is going to be a breeze, I thought. Look at how many steps I've taken! I've only had this pedometer for a few hours and I haven't even left work and I have taken several hundred steps. Sweet.
The next day, I was determined to use the whole day to my advantage. In the morning, I walked halfway to work (4 miles) and caught the Metro the rest of the way (the other 4 miles). I felt really good about the 6,000+ steps I'd taken by the time I got to work, but this is when I realized I have become something previously unthinkable. I have become what could be described as "sedentary."
Now would be a good time to thank to Dr. Val Jones, who brought it to my attention that I should be walking 10,000 steps a day. After 6,000 steps, my warm fuzzy feelings toward Dr. Val began to fade.
Determined to cross the 10,000 step mark into the territory of Ted Eytan, MD (walker extraordinaire), I did the reverse commute home, logging another 4 mile walk. My grand total for the first day was 14,174. I felt pretty good about myself. Although I had developed an illogical resentment towards Dr. Val by this point, I had put just about as many miles as Ted does on an average day (and this guy does walking meetings!).
After 14,000+ steps, my feet were really hurting me. I realized this whole walking thing is harder than it looks. It takes more time than I thought. I get sweaty. I find myself being annoyed by other people's success (more about that later). This is going to be interesting.
Comments
Sore feet
WOW! 10,000 steps!! Really? I've been walking for 30 min/day since August 4 and I wouldn't try that! I work in Oakland, CA. A couple of weeks ago I decided to walk from my office around Lake Merritt that is pretty much in the middle of town. I used a pedometer app on my iPhone called iTreadmill. The round trip turned out to be 2.5 mi and took me an hour. The last quarter mile I felt like I had elephantitis!
This does raise a concern for me. I think often people get conflicting information or information out of context from medical authorities that cause them to set goals that are impossible to maintain. Seems to me that helps set up a feeling of failure that can discourage further effort. I guess we all have to be the judge of how we handle challenges, but my experience has taught me to take it easy and build up to goals slowly.
Another thought: I like to pair health 2.0 with the general notion of "personalized medicine." We all need to figure out what we can really do for ourselves. Often that can take years and it changes with life experience. It's really quite personal.
No Joke!
I agree that health goals should be based on "personalized medicine." The reality is that most of us are overweight and/or out-of-shape. Sometimes the technology is not widely available (not everyone has an iPhone) and sometimes the goals are simply not physically achievable in the short term. It seems like a fair amount of innovation comes from people who are not particularly challenged when it comes to resources and are already living an active lifestyle.
As you are saying, we all have different situations. We have different health histories, health conditions, and current health status. That reminds me of when I was pregnant with my now 12 year old son...I gained 50 lbs. I was thin to start with, so this was a reasonable amount of wait to gain, but I was struck by how much more difficult it is to walk when you are carrying around an extra 30-50 lbs.
I've been able to meet the 10,000 step goal a couple of times a week, but it's been incredibly time consuming and distruptive to my routine. Thankfully, I live in a nice area where I have the option to walk 4 miles in relative safety. And I have a job where they tolerate me showing up late and sweaty and inappropriately dressed for the workplace. I already owned two nice pairs of running shoes that I use as walking shoes. I was able to go buy some thin, synthetic socks to reduce chafing on my feet from walking so much. I also bought "walking pants" because I was too sweaty and uncomfortable in my regular casual clothes.
What about the people who live in areas that are not walkable? The U.S. is unique in that its infrastructure was built to promote personal automobile transportation to the detriment of walking, biking, and public transportation options.
In the past few weeks, I've logged a lot of steps, but my eating habits have taken a turn for the worse. Carving out the time to exercise has eaten into my schedule enough where I don't have the time or energy to cook something healthy at the end of the day, particularly during the week.
Getting healthy is incredibly complex! I agree; we need to have individualized and incremental goals to avoid getting overwhelmed and giving up.
Cindy, you've done a great
Cindy, you've done a great job listing the reasons why living the healthy life is so difficult for so many people. I think one of the greatest ironies of our time is how we've spent so much effort engineering the workplace -- "labor saving" devices -- and transportation -- wowee, we don't have to live in the stinky city! -- that we now have to introduce artificial exercise. And we have another problem for most: we don't have time for it. If that's the situation for most then I don't know what we can expect of people. Right now the fight in Washington is not about "health reform"; it;'s about insurance reform. (I just heard Michelle Obama say so on the TV a little while ago.) Health reform is much bigger, and it is going to take a cultural revolution including the medical paradigm to include Health 2.0
Re the iPhone: on my blog I'm going to make the argument that the next generation of cell phones, aka, "smart phones," will have pretty much all the functionality necessary to make them our mobile hubs for health information and health monitoring. With the iPhone you can see the beginnings right now. I'm confident smart phones will become as ubiquitous in a few years as standard cell phones are now. The question in my mind is what needs to be done with manufacturers, software writers, and open standards so that the data that can be gathered in real time about our health behavior integrates into H2.0 systems, PHRs, and the medical paradigm that hopefully will emerge in the next decade?