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 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.