About 6 months ago, I joined the Health Miles program at my gym. It basically involves wearing a pedometer, uploading the ped points to a web site that tracks these and taking some bio-measurements at a machine at the gym. Aside from being a nice way to track progress on weight, body fat, blood pressure and have a nice history, it is pretty motivating to have a daily number of how lazy, or not, you’ve been.

Now, I’ve joined a challenge team. It is a contest, both for individuals and as a team. I joined a random team because I liked the name.

Prizes
Individual with the Most Steps: $1000
1st Place Team: $300 per team member
2nd Place Team: $100 per team member
Each Participant with 300,000 Steps will be entered to win a $500 gift card to Whole Foods Market
Each Participant with 200,000 Steps will earn a Spectrum Walk it Off T-shirt AND an entry into a drawing for $200
Each additional 100,000 steps (after 200K) will earn the participant an additional entry into the drawing for $200 (15 Winners)

I am hoping to average between 7k and 10k steps per day. I really don’t know how this will compare to others’ efforts. Since I work from home, pretty much none of my pedometer points are “free” points. I can pretty much get through a day with 500 steps or less. Maybe once we get into it and I see how remedial a 7k effort is, I can try to boost that a little.

So, by way of warming up to the challenge, I decided to see if I could average 7k steps for a week. And I did! 7,442 (on average) steps per day for the last 7 days. And that’s not counting whatever I do for the next 2 hours… which I think is going to be eating and watching Wimbledon on TiVo so that isn’t really going to boost my average much.

But I did 7k and even with a rest day in there.

The challenge begins on the 18th. I hope by then I will be fully in the swing of getting some steps in every day. The challenge lasts 4 weeks and I would very much like to see myself at 165 lbs. at the end of it. That would be grand.