DeMont: Tyranny of 10,000 steps

I always felt sorry for J. Alfred Prufrock, the fictional, indecisive middle-aged man who bleakly measured out his life with coffee spoons.

Then the other day I realized that I now measure out mine in steps, not the metaphorical ones, but the real ones, that click the meter on my iPhone forever forward. Which, in some ways, can seem just as sad.

My quest is likely the same as yours, your partner's, and the complete stranger you just passed on the street, who almost ran into you, because they were checking the fitness tracker on their Apple Watch.

We're all hell-bent on getting in the 10,000 daily steps that are thought to be the key to being truly healthy. Even Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger, used the 10,000 steps measure to keep himself fit, according to the new Netflix movie, The Two Popes.

Now, praise the Lord, I have another reason to always carry my cellphone with me. Because if I leave it at home, my steps don't register, which is almost as if they didn't really happen.

I don't just go for a walk anymore. I don't take a stroll, like my father did on the way into work in downtown Halifax, or go for a ramble like my grandfather used to along Senator's Corner in Glace Bay.

I'm trying to “get my steps in.” We all are really.

Of course, good things come from getting out and walking around: the body's mass briefly halts its inexorable rise; the quads firm.

If you speed up the pace a little, as if in pursuit of the number 1 Spring Garden bus, your heart rate can even approach the level of the cardio-vascular workload that we're all supposed to achieve for a few hours every week. (Those damn numbers again.)

Even if you ignore the physical benefits, just getting outside benefits us in innumerable ways: being in nature is good for the soul; getting out of the house forces all of us, even the true misanthropes, to wave and say a few passing words to others. And, interacting with people, the research tells us, is the key to a longer, happier life.

All of which I accept without reservation. Except, what about the purposeless walk, the ramble, the stroll, the wander?

Good things we know come from just stepping out the door and, with no discernible goal in mind, putting one foot in front of another. Charles Dickens, as a BBC story pointed out a few years ago, would walk 20 miles often at night to the point where “you can almost smell London's atmosphere in his prose.”

Virginia Wolf was a walker, as was W.G. Sebald, ditto George Orwell, all of whom forged the occasional good idea while ambulatory.

Henry David Thoreau, “walked and walked and walked,” a fact that, being in the midst of his book about Cape Cod, I know to be true.

Steve Jobbs and Barack Obama, both of whom were fond of having walking meetings with staffers, had some decent ideas out walking around.

But none of these folks were stopping every couple of blocks to check their steps on their iPhones. None of them were working out calculations from point A to B, so they could still keep track of their “steppage,” in case their tracker ran out of juice.

It can be existence-diminishing to mete our your life in steps. But it is a little dubious, too.

I did some fancy googling to try and get to the bottom of who came up with this 10,000-step figure since I've always been suspicious of nice round numbers like that.

I don't want to be Mr. Buzz kill, since anything that gets you out and moving around is to be celebrated, but the figure turns out to be completely arbitrary.

London's The Guardian newspaper pointed out that it has its roots in a marketing campaign launched to take advantage of the popularity of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. A company named Yamasa designed the world's first wearable pedometer, a device called a manpo-kei, which translates as “10,000-step meter.”

The same piece quoted some researchers who said that as little as 6,000 steps a day could be all a person really needs to protect themselves against cardio-vascular disease.

On the other hand, none of those figures take into account the important variable of intensity, since getting out of breath and elevating your heart rate can be more valuable than just puttering around at a stop-and-go pace.

The 10,000-step life, therefore, can be a little illusory.

Now, it could be age and decrepitude ensuring that I'm not working out at the pace at which I once did. But I place some of the blame on the tyranny of the steps.

The bar has been lowered. When I hit send on this I could go seek out a gym, get on the bike or lace on the sneakers. Or I can just take the dog for a walk, which is pleasant indeed, even if it's not all that it is cracked up to be.

123RF The step meter is clicking.