Today is the two year anniversary of walking (not just averaging) 10,000 steps per day. This last year I walked a total of 6.9 million steps. This is a major increase over the year before, and that was because I stupidly signed up for a step competition at work.

Back in March, I was asked if I wanted to join a team at the high school for a step competition. I was training for a marathon at the end of April, so I said, why not? Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was getting myself in to.

I originally planned for approximately 18,000 steps a day. This would give me one million steps by the end of the competition, and, what I assumed, would be first place. Oh, how I could not be more wrong.

The high school soccer coach went out like gangbusters in the first week, beating me by 64,000 steps for the week. I could not let this go, and I stepped up my walking (see what I did there? stepped up my walking :-). My alarm would be set for 4:30am, and I would have almost 20,000 steps in before work. For last Christmas, we got a new treadmill for home. The old treadmill was set up in my office with a computer and dual monitors so I could walk and work at the same time. This became very important because I was having to spend 7-8 hours a day walking. Tara was not impressed, and neither were my feet. I rarely have issues with blisters, but for the last month I was continually having to deal with them.

With the help of the step competition I broke several person records. On May 14 I had 65,439 steps, first time I’ve broken 65,000 steps in a day. During week 7 of the competition I had 353,380 steps (over 50,000 per day)!

In the end I was victorious, with 2.2 million number of steps in the step competition. To put that number in to perspective, I had 4.5 million steps in my first year of 10,000 steps a day.

For the next year, I’m upping the ante to 12,000 steps per day. I started back on September 18, so I’m already two months into that goal.