Never as planned

I have completed my first week of the Turkey Trot.

If you will recall, there are many Turkey Trots. This one is a 28 day, 280000 step challenge that I am doing through https://walkertracker.com/. It is supposed to be tracing a path in the shape of a turkey, but I can never get the map to load. Knowing my virtual location on the path would be fun, but the real goal was to move more, and I am.

With effort, I have been able to keep up with the challenge. 

Working at home and only doing things around the house, it would be easy to stay somewhere around 4000 steps per day. With a desk job, it is easy to become glued to the chair and get quite stiff.

Adding in some walking in place or dancing or taking extra trips to do mundane tasks can get that over 10000, but that requires attention and monitoring. That is what makes this valuable.

(Only about 2400 extra steps have come from walking outside so far; it's been pretty dark and rainy out there.)

There was some early panic.

I saw that the challenge was supposed to start on October 25th. When I went to enter that first day, I saw that the site runs its weeks Sunday through Saturday. Who does that? Oh no! I had missed a day!

That led to me making myself get 11000 steps for the first two days, hoping that I could still make the weekly total with a little extra during the work week and then I hoped for a big push on Saturday.

The challenge did, in fact, start on Monday. I overreacted, but I primed to do so because of my procrastination.

I mentioned that I had to order a pedometer. It arrived about a week before the start. In my mind I was going to get it all programmed, then do some testing of different tasks and distances, and I would start the actual challenge out all prepared and organized.

I got hung up early on the reset button not working. It does work, but you have to hold it down for an extended period of time. Given how frustrating unintentional resets can be, this is a good feature. Reading the directions and testing it sorted that out, which I finally got around to the night of the 24th, the day I thought I had missed. 

I still haven't set the clock.

That doesn't really matter. I mean, preparedness is nice, but without that I have already figured out that the average song is 500 steps, changing the litter boxes is 1200 steps, and one loop around the park is 800 steps.

There was nothing wrong with the original vision, other than that it wasn't going to happen and thinking that it needed to happen and not getting there caused some delays and frustration.

So, perhaps in this time period where I am starting a new job and getting caught up on things, this may be the wrong time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Related post:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/10/one-more-thing-about-work.html