Tuesday, July 09, 2013

The Journey Starts With A Single Step


HP just finished another "Shape UP Challenge" where we track our steps and exercise minutes. In the past I just tracked around those times. This time I started around Labor Day because I knew I was going to run the Disneyland Half Marathon and I wanted to see how many steps I took. A lot! 45 THOUSAND steps. After that I just sorta kept going... 

As a reminder: 2,000 is about 1 mile.

Here's how to read the chart above:
  • Blue dots are daily steps. Yep, I've been tracking for a while. I have a cheap pedometer and save them to Simplenote at the end of each day and then transfer them to a spreadsheet once a month.
  • The green line is a cumulative average of ALL the steps. So over time that line gets more and more stable.
  • The yellow is simply a 7-day rolling average with the yellow dots being the weekly average. It helps to draw out the pattern of the blue craziness.

The next chart is easy to read: It's my average steps each day of the week. The green line represents the overall average: 7,660 steps per day


A few observations:

  • When I hurt my hand in November, my activity really dropped off. I think there was also a double whammy of it being winter.
  • I'm definitely headed into a more active period, but not at 10,000 per day yet.
  • Saturday and Wednesday are still my most active days. I typically go into the office on Wednesday and walk around the site at least once.
  • I don't have periods of persistent "down time". At least once a week I get good amount of steps in.
  • Vacations are good. I tend to do a ton of walking, like in Las Vegas.
  • I'm probably the only person who actually finds this interesting... Jessi thinks I'm crazy.
I plan to keep going. With even more data, I can start to do some really interesting comparisons.

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