I keep insisting on reaching an annual average of 10K steps per day. Over the 2 years, I crawled to the goal by slowly replacing car time with walk time. The rule of the thumb is that 30 minutes of driving in the city can be replaced by 1h of walking, reducing the overall time cost of walking. However, I fully eliminated the city driving without even reaching an average of 8K.

I also do weekly hikes. These started with weekend walks in the park. Over the summer, we switched to doing hikes with my wife. The hikes can easily exceed 20k steps and move the average significantly up. However, it’s not possible to do that every week. Weather, babysitting, and health issues seems to make hiking unreliable.

The system I experiment with right now is the morning walk. Start the day with 7-8K, and then it almost doesn’t matter if I move at all, or if I do the weekly hike. The 10K average gets achieved. This approach is not without problems as well and I’m not sure it can be sustained.

• It’s 8 am right now, 2°C outside, it’s cold
• Dogs walkers everywhere. Stray dogs have not been fed by their humans. It feels unsafe. I was attacked once already, thankfully by a slow pug of some kind
• Rush hour traffic – toxic fumes near the streets greatly limit the possible paths
• It hurts. I’ve not figured that part out bit there’s pain.

The morning walk has other advantages – I can process the news and requests I received overnight, think about who does what and when. I feel like it slightly improves my productivity.

So, although the system with the morning walk consistently moves the average over 10k and adds processing time, I feel like I can’t sustain it. I’m not sure if it will be the cold weather, the darkness, a dog bite, or something else that will end it.