Today marks the end of 1 year of walking at least 10,000 steps a day. Why did I start November 6th of 2017? I don’t know. There have been some rough patches where I was lucky to get my steps in. Twice I was sick, but I still drug myself to the treadmill. Once I was almost in bed when I realized I needed a few hundred more steps. And then, with 5 days to go, disaster strikes!

I got home and was changing out of my work clothes. My watch had me at 6,500 steps which isn’t bad, only 3,500 steps to go. I pulled out my FitBit and checked how many steps it had, but the Fitbit was non-responsive. At some point of the day, the battery died. I plugged it in, hoping that there were at least a few thousand steps on it. Once the Fitbit turned back on I checked: 263. That means it died as soon as I got to work. So, after letting the FitBit get a little bit of a charge, I hit the treadmill. An hour and twenty minutes later I have over 10,000 steps and I can sleep easy. I could have just gone off of my watch, but the FitBit website has all of these cool stats that I wanted to use once I made it a year, so I had to do the steps with the FitBit.

Last fall I lost my FitBit not once, but twice in a two week period. The first was in the back yard. I lost it while raking leaves. Using my phone, I could narrow the location of the FitBit down to a general location, but I was going to need a little more help and luck. Since sight was going to help, I turned on the FitBit’s vibration alarm and then listened closely to the piles of leaves. Luckily enough, I found it! Then a little over a week later, we were up town for the Christmas parade. At some point of walking around, I lost my FitBit again! I didn’t realize it until I got home, so I ran back up town. By this time, the town was pretty quiet, and a slight rain had started as I retraced my steps. To help find the FitBit, I used the FitBit app on my phone. It would show a connection once I got within 30 feet of the device. Luckily for me, I didn’t need it, I saw the FitBit on the sidewalk.

Did I lose any weight? Not really. But that wasn’t the point. I wanted to be able to walk anywhere and for however long I needed. The most steps in a day was during our trip to Disney World back in June. On that day I walked 25,713 steps, a few hundred steps shy of a half marathon. That vacation was also the week with the most steps, 121,973 (an average of 17,424 steps per day). Surprisingly, I almost had that many steps during the fair, missing it by 45 steps.

Since I use a FitBit, I can be awarded different badges for completing certain milestones. Here are the badges I earned:

* Great Wall – Completing 5,500 lifetime miles
* Spaceship – Completing 14,000 floors
* Africa Badge – Completing 5,000 lifetime miles
* Nile Badge – Completing 4,132 lifetime miles (the length of the Nile)

My total steps for the year was 4,446,173 with a mileage of 2,019.83. I’ll probably
continue, knowing that at sometime I will miss my 10,000 steps.