An August Challenge

Where Anne works they, well some of them anyway, are taking part in a challenge through August. The challenge is to walk, run or jog 200, 000 steps in August. Now that works out at 6452 steps a day, which if 10,000 equals roughly 5 miles for the average person, is about 3.25 miles or 5.16 Km.

I'm not offering any prizes, but this is the sort of challenge that is just the thing if you want to kick start yourself into doing a bit more exercise. You could use Google maps to work out whether getting off the train or bus in a different place will give you a mile walk. Doing that at both ends of the day already gives you two miles, an evening walk around the block could easily give you the extra steps. Take the stairs for at least one floor or two instead of the lift all the way. There are all sorts of little things you can do to add extra steps to your day.

There is one caveat, you can only count the first 10, 000 steps each day. Any steps over that are good for you, but they don't count towards your total. So don't think you can catch up at the weekends with a long walk through the woods!

And if you don't have a pedometer, my long-time favourite has been the Omron Walking Style II, currently £17.24 from Amazon. I'd still have my original one if I hadn't put it in the washing machine!

There are plenty of others on the market, but this has proved to be nice and robust. And, you don't have to clip it to you belt announcing to the world that you're a step counting fanatic. Just stick it in your pocket and way you go.

Another nice feature is that it keeps a rolling 7 day record, amongst other things.