Seven Thousand Steps

I've been trying to maintain seven thousand steps per day. Some days I've had to do a short walk before bedtime to scrape in the step count.

Today's count was 17247 following a 10km walk.

I've got a script set up which is pulling step counts into a Google spreadsheet. I've got data from my Android phone that goes back to 2014, though there's some patches missing in the earlier data.

I think I'll re-awaken this blog to record my fitness journey.

With the COVID-19 outbreak I may have chosen the wrong year to try signing up for a sponsored event. The London Marathon has been postponed until October, likely that other events will get postponed or cancelled too.

I'm currently using Strava, Garmin Connect and Virgin Pulse, along with the spreadsheet which is pulling information from Google Fit.

Strava uses GPS on either my Android phone or Android Wear watch to track my walks and runs. I've had varying success with the app and how it works with the phone and the watch.

Garmin Connect takes my step count from a health band that I wear 24x7. This tracks steps and sleep. The good thing about this specific health band is that, having very few features it doesn't use much battery power and runs off regular watch batteries instead of needing frequent charging.

Virgin Pulse pulls in data from Garmin and Google fit. The reason I'm using this is it's a service paid for by the company I work for. There's various "challenges" within groups and a certain social element to it.

Each of the systems has something that it tracks which it won't share with the others, there's a certain amount of manual data entry for some aspects.

I weigh myself every day. I'm not overly concerned about my weight but I do want to ensure that it stays sensible. I use Renpho ES-20M Bluetooth scales which automatically send my weight to an app on my phone. While the app does write my weight to Google Fit that information isn't then passed on to Strava, Garmin Connect nor Virgin Pulse. I enter the information into Garmin and Virgin Pulse manually.

At the end of the March, if I've been able to maintain 7000 steps all month, then for April I'll up the game to 10000 steps per day.

Stay tuned for updates and statistics!