Walker Tracker Blog

Walker @Destinye pointed us to this great video:

Sweet. I want stairs like that in my house.

Hi, I’m David and I’m working on Walker Tracker’s corporate walking programs initiative. We’re fans of the Global Corporate Challenge (http://www.gettheworldmoving.com/). It’s ending this week, and so what do you do the rest of the year?

At Walker Tracker, we welcome any company teams that want to continue their walking program during the “offseason”.   After touring the world with the GCC2009, now would be a great time to recruit team members for next year’s event by setting up some friendy challenges in Walker Tracker.  Please let us know if you’ve recently completed the GCC – we’re anxious to hear about your experiences.

Hi all -

We’re going to have a scheduled downtime for approximately 30 minutes starting at 4pm today for updates and maintenance.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

See you on the other side.

Like most every social website, we get people (or bots, most likely) who sign up in order to spam the site with their dubious commercial enterprises. Today I kindly had a member point out a spammer to me (Thanks TLS!), which I quickly dispatched with (kerpow!). Both bots and people are a little challenging to weed out. For bots, you can usually foil them w/ a human-intelligence barrier to entry, while it’s very difficult to spot real people who wish to spam. I feel like I’ve seen an uptick in the latter. These are people who are employed (probably for a pittance) to join sites such as this to post links in order create better search results in search engines.

I realized then that this is one  the great things about having a website with a reward mechanism — in this case a point-system. I can put a price on spammers. This works well in just about every way.

1) I’m alerted to users who, because of the number of signups, it’s prohibitive for me to find

2) Members of the community are awarded for spotting these

3) Both of us benefit from having the spammer gone.

It’s crowd-sourced spam control.

The alternate scenario is:

1) I likely wouldn’t see the spam

2) It would annoy another member, or make them feel like there was low quality control on the site (or the site was being overrun)

3) I might get notified, depending upon if I’d had personal contact with that person, or if they felt like it was worth the effort.

The ease-of-reporting is also an important factor – and so building a reporting system into the site is on the list.

Google’s walking maps. I can’t say enough good things about this utility. The directions are clear and accurate, the time estimation meshes with the moderate activity guidelines, and it even projects a step count for you! All you have to do is put in an address or intersection starting point and destination, and select ‘walking’ from the drop-down menu (’By car’ is the default, and ‘public transit’ the other option) and you get instant walking directions that take one-way streets and sidewalks into account.

My favorite cookbook writer, Mark Bittman, put this link out on his Twitter feed today. A dynamic map showing the swift increase in obesity rates across the U.S., broken down by state. Watching the annual shift from light blue to red really brings home the swift increase in obesity. Where does your state fit in? Walking regularly is one way to combat this epidemic!

Walk Score dot com. I had heard about this website but not realized how multi-functional it was until I checked it out myself. A “walk score” is basically the number of places you can walk to from any given address. I plugged in my current address and my soon-to-be-current address and was beyond pleased to see that my home walking score would increase from 75 to 82 — with a maximum score of 100, both are quite acceptable. However, walkscore.com goes so far as to list and categorize the walkable amenities. There I could see that I am far closer to many possible walking destinations, as well as learn more about the contents of my new neighborhood. Yoga classes less than half a mile away? Sign me up!

Remember classroom pizza parties? They were such a treat. We would get a couple of greasy cardboard boxes of pizza slices, followed by a tiny plastic tub of orange and vanilla swirled ice cream. I loved to eat that ice cream with the tiny wooden paddles that were provided in lieu of spoons. Well, one Southwest Virginia school replaced its end-of-year pizza party with an activity party, and the students unanimously agreed that rock climbing and swimming are better than sitting in a classroom eating pizza. One of the most exciting parts of this story is that while many of the students qualified for the party by virtue of test scores, one kindergarten class made it in after winning a pedometer contest! Nineteen kindergarteners recorded 436,000 steps in just eight days. Pretty amazing, and awesome.

Hooray! We’re on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/walkertracker

Stop on by and say hi. Ben

St. Patrick’s Day saw the release of a fascinating pedometer-based study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

A small group of researchers was interested in translating the public health recommendation that all Americans should engage in 2.5 hours of moderate activity each week into an easy-to-follow “pedometer-based guideline.”

After clipping pedometers to 97 adults and tracking their metabolic rates at different speeds of walking, the researchers came to the conclusion that walking 100 steps a minute, or 3,000 steps in half an hour, is an ideal pace to meet the guidelines. There were slight differences in exactly what the ideal rate was for men compared to women, and for overweight or obese persons compared to normal weight persons. However, the 100 steps a minute rate is accessible and easy to remember for all, and, the study concludes, close enough for all groups of people to be effective in reaching the goal.

The study was performed on treadmills, which I had long heard were not as beneficial as just plain walking outdoors, but the paper takes pains to lay my qualms to rest, saying, “evidence does suggest that walking on a treadmill and walking overground are kinetically and kinematically equivalent in healthy subjects.”

I took a look at the chart breaking all the proposed ideal step rates down into categories, and was a little surprised to see that though most of the categories did fall into the “approximately 100 steps a minute” range, under one of the three analyses available, adults of “normal weight” would more likely benefit from walking at a pace of 127 steps per minute.

I know that I’m going to dig up a watch with a second hand and go for a walk today after I finish planting tulips. I’d like to see how fast it feels to walk 100+ steps a minute!

The full paper is available on the American Journal of Preventive Medicine’s website. Its complete title is: Translating Physical Activity Recommendations into a Pedometer-Based Step Goal: 3000 Steps in 30 Minutes

The sky is gray with strips of frothy sunset. The waves are being sucked back down the sand, every lash onto the beach falling lower than the one before it. I don’t know what’s in front of us, and the mystery pulls me forward, every step a comforting rhythm. I am three years old.

“You would walk for miles,” my mom tells me. “We would go to the beach, and you would walk and walk and walk. You never wanted to turn back. You never wanted to be carried.”

Years have passed since then. Decades, even. And though my love for walking has never subsided, my opportunities have. I have a child of my own now, and I remember learning, sometime in the hourless days of his infancy, that 10,000 steps — any kind of step, from carrying groceries to pacing a room with a sleepy baby, to running for the bus to getting dressed in the morning — was the magic number: A baseline for optimal health. Get a pedometer, I was advised. It counts your steps for you, so you can be sure. Maybe sometimes you’ll need to walk around the block just one more time, the way during your pregnancy you would have a spoon of peanut butter at night, for the protein quota. I got a pedometer, from somewhere, and clipped it to my waistband. It didn’t work. It reset itself to zero at the slightest jostle. I dropped it and the batteries rolled out. It didn’t count my steps. Oh well, I said to myself. I’ll just keep taking stairs instead of elevators and parking at the far end of the parking lot. I’m sure I walk 10,000 steps a day.

That was almost five years ago. When Ben asked a few weeks ago if I’d be interested in writing for this website, I was inspired to formalize my walking once again. I’d get a pedometer, a good one this time (Ben sent me the Omron HJ-112), and though I’m still figuring it out, it is about a million times better than that old translucent blue one with the unreliable battery door.

So I’ll be blogging here now, combining two of my great loves — writing and walking — keeping my eye out for interesting, informative, cool walking stories for you to read, and tracking my own progress.

I always welcome comments and questions, so please don’t be shy about contacting me, either through comments here or at my email address: robin@walkertracker.com.

It’s a busy day at Walker Tracker -

We were chosen as a Kim Komando cool site of the day. Thanks, Kim!

We were blogged on Crooked Timber, by Eszter Hargittai. Thanks Eszter!

And we signed our first Private Level in New Zealand. 

So yes – the site is hopping today, and we’re monitoring it to make sure it stays up and stays fast.

Thanks all,

Ben

Martin Vosseler vows not to enter a car until he reaches Boston, 3,000 miles from his starting point, in the name of solar energy.

Great stuff. We better get Martin a pedometer pronto.

Read about Martin at WorldChanging or visit his website: SunWalk2008.com