StepSuccess walking experiment update 3

Here’s the latest update in my walking experiment! (The previous updates are here and here.) I’ve got two weeks to cover so let’s get on with it.

First up, an apology to StepSuccess! There are several functions I hadn’t even realised it’s capable of, so I need to clear that up right away:

WEEKLY DISPLAY
In my previous post, I was confused about why it seemed to display a week as Saturday to Saturday. It doesn’t. That was me being dim. Actually, the weekly highlights section simply the last seven days.

DISTANCE MEASUREMENT ACCURACY
A few people had asked about the accuracy of the distance/measurement aspect of the device, and I said I thought it couldn’t be very accurate as you’re not asked to input stride measurement (and it doesn’t use GPS). Again, my bad. The unit works by measuring foot contact time with the ground (which has been shown to be inversely proportional to a person’s speed). So, once it has captured this, that’s how it calculates distance and caloric burn. So, initially, the unit is accurate on distance to about 85%, but you can actually configure it to your own stride and this makes it 98% accurate. (You do this online, in the ‘devices’ tab above your activity board – there’s a ‘calibrate actiped’ option. I’m not sure how I missed this!)

Apologies, StepSuccess! I really should read instructions…

OK, so onto this week and last week’s walking stats!

My husband is now back from his Rocky Mountains trip (hooray!) so I’ve been walking a lot less than I was whilst he was away. I didn’t want to go from lots of walking to virtually none, though, so I’ve been doing at least one dog walk a day (apart from exceptional circumstances involving horrendously early starts and work days which turned into evenings), along with one or two trips to the gym a day (it’s about a 5 minute walk from my house).

I must admit there were a couple of days when I forgot to put the unit on my shoe, and then other days when I – *gasp* – wore shoes other than trainers for part of the day (yes, I sometimes wear heels!) However, here are the scores on the doors:

w/c 15th Aug

w/c 22nd Aug

Any new PBs?

Since I started tracking my walking on 2nd August

In summary, last week, I:
– walked 39,336 steps (and plenty of undocumented ones!)
– walked for 7 hours 28 mins (and a few more)
– covered 19.48 miles

And this week, I:
– walked 42,924 steps (and plenty of undocumented ones!)
– walked for 7 hours 53 mins (and a few more)
– covered 20.84 miles

TheFitDog says hi, but he’s a little too sad to comment further on his recent walking adventures. We saw a dead cat on our walk the other day and that made him sad. Then he heard that one of his friends, Boston, had to be put down. That made him really sad. Here is his sad face:

COMP UPDATE
It’s now 14 days (!) until my next comp (the NPA South East qualifier) and 21 (!!) days until the BNBF Finals. HOW has the time flown by so quickly? It has a habit of doing that, I suppose. I’m going to blog tomorrow with an update on training, diet, maybe some progress pics and probably a day’s eats, since that’s something a lot of people ask me about. Brace yourself for a lot of MEAT! ;D

StepSuccess walking experiment update 3 is a post from The Fit Writer blog.

Nicola Joyce – the Fit Writer – is a freelance copywriter and journalist who writes for the sport and fitness industry. Her main website is here.