The Story of Joel & My Daily 10000
Yesterday I shared an ever so small insight into the history of the website My Daily 10000. So today I thought it might be a good idea to also introduce myself and a little of my story.
My name is Joel and I have in a way become obsessed with tracking my walking. Well, maybe not entirely obsessed, but I have put more than a little extra effort into putting together numbers in a spreadsheet. That is on top of the raw numbers that my fitness tracker uploads to the internet each day.
Where It All Started
In the past, I did track my steps for periods of time with a pedometer. However, these things never seemed to really stick. I would get tired of wearing the device or more commonly forget to record the number and reset the device. Leading to no idea how many steps I was walking each day.
That all changed in December 2014, when I received a Garmin Vivofit as a Christmas gift. It was something that I wore on my wrist instead of my waistband, which suited me much better. But more importantly, the data could be uploaded via an app and automatically was recorded for the correct days.
That is almost five years ago now and I am still tracking my steps.
Why Track My Steps
What you track you can improve and since I started tracking my steps there have been significant improvements. You can see the very first day that I tracked my steps (week 52, 2014) I recorded just 1,579 steps.
I would love to point that out as an error, or that I only got the gift late in the day. But in a way that is truly representative of a day that I did not NEED to move much. It was Christmas day, there was little to do but spend time with family and friends at home.
Maybe on a different day, such as a weekend or the like, I might do up to 5,000 steps. But it often would take a specific reason or a day when I was working to see me get anywhere near 10,000 steps.
By wearing the fitness tracker and watching the steps I was recording, gave me much greater awareness. Once I was more aware, I wanted to push myself to achieve more.
A Rough Start
The beginning of my journey to walking a minimum of 10,000 steps a day was a little bumpy. There were plenty of days that I surpassed the 10,000 steps needed.
But there were also plenty of days that I missed the 10,000 steps as well. There was a four day period that I did not wear the fitness tracker when I got hives. I initially thought something in the plastic might have been leeching into my body. However, eventually connected the dots that I had been bitten by a leech.
My worst month was May when I hit a patch of nine days through the month when I missed my goal. I had one of those moments when I looked at the idea of walking 10,000 steps per day and thought what is the point. I did get a little past this in June.
A New Target
In late July 2015, I decided that I wanted to give myself a little more of a challenge and set a new daily target of 15,000 steps. Initially, this was only to be for 30 days, but 30 days later that got extended to a year.
Initially, the higher goal was just to try and push me back into motion with a short term higher goal. However, once I had that 30 days down, I wanted to push myself to see if I could stick with it for the year. For that year it became not so much about the walking. It became very much about could I stick with something that was that little bit more difficult.
It’s All In The Numbers
That is a brief introduction to me and my journey to tracking and improving my walking. There is a bit more to know about me, but do not want to be too overwhelming with major long posts. So the rest of the story, about me as a person and my other interests will be coming soon.
