My grandpa used to walk around with the very first pedometers when I was a young girl and it's pretty funny to me now how popular they have become. At the time, I thought my grandpa was a bit anal and nerdy. He used to have this special belt strap that he hooked a pedometer, a box of really hideous-tasting silver mint balls, and a pocket English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary.
The dictionary he only carried with him when I was around because many times during a conversation I would say something like, "Do you want to go to the place-with-a-lot-of-books-that-is-not-a-bookstore-because-you-don't-buy-them-you-borrow-them later?" I mean, my parents never taught me the Taiwanese word for "library." That's when he would reach down on flip open the plastic pouch on his belt and whip out the dictionary for me to flip through and point to the word.
During the day of the walk, Peter and I were in agreement was that we were going to walk one mile and head on back home. Peter's ride to work is about 4.25 miles away and he wanted to try to see how long it would take him to walk that distance. So, we figured, we would multiply the time it took us to walk two miles and extrapolate.
So we leashed up the dogs and took off down Main Street. It was so nice to be outside and to not be wearing flannel mom-jeans. I love this time of year, right before the horrible NY face-melting summers.
Periodically, I kept checking the pedometer. After what seemed to us like a huge distance and we approached the next town over, the pedometer said we had only walked half-a-mile. Peter was all, "I don't THINK so. That thing is BROKEN."
I didn't think that it was broken because I had counted out some steps the pedometer was accurately counting my steps. Also, I wanted to hit that 10,000 paces mark, which Peter and I have NEVER approached during a walk. It's the magic per-day number of paces that scientists say a person should walk for optimal health. So I kept encouraging him to keep on walking farther and farther.
"We'll walk until it says one mile and we'll go back home," I said.
About 2 HOURS later, we were on our way home and Scout just stopped walking and refused to move. She's going to be ten years old in a month and must be getting on in years, because she used to have the crazy boundless energy, and in all these years, she's never once stopped in the middle of a walk. During this whole walk, Peter would point out random landmarks and say, "Now, I KNOW that this (fill-in-the-blank-post office/ dry cleaner/ fire station) is AT LEAST (1, 1.5, 2) miles away from home."
Peter looked at me and said, "If I have to carry this 60-pound dog home, it's going to be all your fault."
At that point, we could almost see our apartment building, so we urged Scout to keep walking. We are all super-tired and my feet were threatening to go on strike. My shoes hurt my feel terribly, but I didn't feel like I had a right to complain, since I was the one who kept pushing everyone onward.
When we got home, I Mapquested the route we walked and discovered that we had almost covered 5 miles!
"Throw that pedometer AWAY," Peter said.
"Hey, look at the bright side," I said. "We conquered the 10,000 paces! Scientists want us to spend two hours walking a day. Although walking to work is going to set your commute back two hours in the morning."
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