Dear LPG, 

As a grandma I can remember my grandchildren bringing their sponsorship forms around each summer and asking if I will sign up to give a bit of money if they manage to walk so far for a school charity.  

Then we would wait to hear that they had done it and it was our duty to pay up, but do you realise just how many steps you take each day?  I have had one of those step-tracker watches for a while now.  I thought it was a ridiculous notion for a person in their 80s, but it was a present from my children one Christmas and after ignoring it for a while I put it on.   

I read somewhere that in 1964 the idea of 10000 being a healthy number of steps to take each day was used as part of an advert campaign, and that is fine if you are young and really fit.  

At my age there is no way that I am going to take 10,000 steps every day but, once it was all set up with my mobile phone, I noticed that a history of how many steps I take each day gets registered, and every now and then I would find myself looking at my step history. 

‘Average’ is a very general word, but the internet tells that an average amount of 2500 steps is quite normal for a person who is not even trying to be fit.  I decided to take an average of my daily steps over a week and found that while just going about my routine I was registering more than that so I can’t be doing too badly.  A trip around the shops with my friend the other day added a further 1000 steps to my normal 3000 a day but it also got me thinking about what else you can do with them.

Now that a couple of my friends have got themselves fitness watches too, we have found ourselves comparing our step counts and we all do about 2500 to 3000 per day while we are just getting through our normal daily routines.  That is well over 50,000 steps per week between the three of us which gave us an idea.  We have decided to do a sponsored virtual walk for charity.

Did you know that, according to the internet, for every 2000 steps you take, you are walking about a mile?  That means that between us three, we are clocking up more than 20 virtual miles a week while pottering about the house and ambling through the shops without even breaking a sweat. 

We are quite proud of ourselves really but found ourselves wondering what we could do with all this stepped-up information.  Which is when I remembered those grandchildren I mentioned.  We oldies have decided to take a leaf out of their sponsorship books and turn the tables a little. 

Our plan is to get together for a real but leisurely walk round the park every day for a week in the summer, in a bid to get the step count up a bit and get some of our family members to sponsor us to do a collective twenty-five-mile virtual walk in a week.   Our plan is to get fit and make a bit of money for charity and who knows, after the challenge is over we might just keep walking around the park together. 

I’ll let you know how it goes but we hope that, now we can all get out again, this might be an idea worth sharing…

CW, Catford,

We found a little information that very loosely backs up a few of CW’s findings… 

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