Exercise trends seem come and go every few years. From Jazzercise, to at home fitness workouts, these programs tend to stick around for a little bit before they slowly fade away- but recently, one trend has seemed to stick: walking.
Now this may seem silly- isn’t walking always “in”? And yes people have always used walking as exercise, but what I mean more specifically by this is the trend of counting your steps. Just look around the next time your outside and try to count the number of Fitbits or IWatchs people use while they try to reach that magical number of 10,000 steps a day.
At Washington and Lee, I found it a little difficult to reach 10,000 steps a day. My average walk to campus was under 10 minutes and once there, I spent the majority of my day sitting in class or in the library. According to the fitness app on my phone, my average step count per day was around 6-7,000 (keep in mind I spent 2-3 hours every day in the pool).
While preparing for Copenhagen, I knew I would be walking more, but I completely underestimated how much more. On any given day here, I walk anywhere from 10-30,000 steps- an average of 5-13 miles a day!! Just yesterday I reached a new record person record of 31,311 steps, or 13.7 miles, after wandering the city all day as we showed the first-years around.
I think what surprises me the most about this huge uptake in distance walked per day, is that it doesn’t feel any different from days where I only walked 1 or 2 miles. I would have guessed that walking a half marathon in one day would leave me tired with very sore feet. Instead, I feel no different- if anything I love walking more. I look forward to my 15 minute walk to DIS or the 25 minute walk to Paper Island for food. Just last night, Kathryn and I left the hostel at 9 p.m. to walk 15 minutes out of our way to get waffles and ice cream.
While I expect to take many things away from this trip such as a new cultural experience and a more independent nature, I really hope I also keep up this love of walking! I know it is going to be difficult to find this much time to walk around and explore Lexington when I have class everyday but I think that even finding the time to walk around for 20 minutes will be a positive addition to my daily routine.