Every step counts

So, as I mentioned earlier, I saw Super Size Me recently.

One of the themes that kept getting raised in the movie was the amount of walking people do--tens of thousands of steps per day for New Yorkers, compared to maybe 2000-2500 steps for suburbanites who commute to work.

This made me curious as to how much walking I do. Not having a pedometer or other device to measure steps, I had to resort to crude counting. However, the results were illuminating.

From my apartment, it takes:

--About 3000 steps to go to the grocery store and back.
--About 1000 steps to get to the nearest T stop.
--About 200 steps to the convenience store around the corner.

At work:

--About 350 steps from the T to my office; and 400 in the other direction.
--75 steps to the end of the hall.
--250 steps to the sub shop in the building next door.

Given all the random walking I do up and down the halls during a typical day, this amounts to something in the neighborhood of 7500 steps per day--or roughly 4 miles. Not quite downtown Manhattan level, but pretty respectable. On the other hand, I might want to investigate walking from Harvard Square to MIT [provided I can do it before it gets too hot during the day in the summertime].