Getting Our Steps
Is it important to walk 10,000 steps each day to stay fit? The BBC reports that three brisk 10-minute walks per day are actually more effective for heart health. Researchers compared average step counts from the U.S. with other countries:
- United States: 5,117 steps. This is about 2.5 miles or about 4 kilometers each day.
- Switzerland: 9,650 steps. This is about 4.8 miles or 8 kilometers each day.
- Japan: 7,168 steps. This is about 3.5 miles or 6 kilometers each day.
On the first day of August, while our husbands played golf, Nina and I took a long walk to Embo on the higher path beside Royal Dornoch Golf course, seeing many lovely flowers along the way. We returned by the beach path, talking about Scotland and America, families and friends, books and travel. After 19,256 steps (7.4 miles), we slept well that night, ready for the Highland Games the next day.
A week later, on August 8, Roger, Jim, and Steve played in a senior golf tournament about an hour from Dornoch on the Black Isle. Nina and I walked from the Club to the town of Fortrose and visited an ancient cathedral.
Vendors in 18th-century dress were setting up booths around the Cathedral Square, but not yet selling their wares. By chance, we had stumbled upon Fortrose’s annual St. Boniface Fair. Promptly at 12:45, a visiting pipe band led a parade, the town crier rang his bell, the town clerk read a proclamation, and the Fair was underway. At one of the stalls Nina met Sarah Dunton, the artist who had painted the piece she had bought in Cromarty a few days before.
From the Fortrose Fair we walked a few miles south to Chanonry Point on the Moray Firth, chatting along the way with a young single mother from Holland and her three children. A large crowd had gathered near the Chanonry Point Lighthouse to look for dolphins. Sure enough we saw three or four in the dark waters between Chanonry Point and Fort George across the Firth. Though we had expected rain, the weather was warm and dry; the clouds, magnificent. When she heard how nice it was, Allene wished she had come, too.
After sitting in the sun for awhile, we trudged northward on the Black Isle beach to meet our husbands at the club. Our daily total of steps came to 14,726 (6.1 miles)–not as many as August 1, but enough to make us feel quite fit. Mike Morrison, a local golfer who had played with Jim, bought us a drink. Mike, a retired London Police detective, had visited all 50 of the United States before he turned 50! In the Highlands, Nina and I have enjoyed nature, learned some history, and met interesting people while getting our steps.
Nina arrived in Scotland with a list of 10 possible day trips to take from Dornoch. With these walks and our Highland Adventures with Marion, we completed eight of them and still have two to try another time. In 14 days we averaged 7,680 steps or 3.8 miles per day. In our multi-story dwellings, we climbed 13 floors per day. And I didn’t carry my phone all the time.
Update: This August 21, 2019 article in the New York Times Magazine reported recent research on this topic by I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. I found this paragraph particularly illuminating:
She found that increasing your average step count by even a small amount reduced your risk of mortality — and that, among the older women in her study, those benefits plateaued at about 7,500 steps per day. The least-active women averaged about 2,700 steps per day; those who averaged just 1,700 more than that, a difference of about a mile, were 41 percent less likely to die of any cause.
Looks to me like our average of 7,680 steps/day was right on target!
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