Treppenwitz 10K Challenge

No, not ten kilometers.  And to be truthful, not really that challenging (unless you are as out of shape as I am).

What we're talking about here is a challenge to try to walk at least 10,000 steps per day for just over a month.  To participate in the challenge you will need to get yourself a pedometer (they're pretty cheap and can be found at most stores that sell sporting goods), and sign up for a membership (free) on the walking tracker website (http://walkertracker.com).

Once you've taken care of those two things, you're good to go. 

The actual competition page is here.  The way it works is that once you've signed up for walker tracker, you accept the challenge and then beggin logging your steps every day.

I've added a wrinkle in the rules:

Since I can't carry a pedometer on Shabbat, I give myself a nice round 5000 steps (a rough estimate of how many steps I walk on a typical Saturday).  Therefore, anyone in the challenge who wants to take a day off each week from tracking their steps (for whatever reason) can assign themselves 5000 steps on that day.

I had actually tried to set up this challenge a while back, but I must have been distracted at the time (or just used to reading Hebrew from right to left) because I reversed the starting and ending dates, with the competition ending before the starting date.  Needless to say, some of the would-be competitors had a field day speculating about time travel and beaming up to the Enterprise and such.  Funny bunch.  

Whatever.  :-) 

Anyway, the Treppenwitz 10K Challenge officially kicks off this Sunday, 24 May and ends on June 26th.  There's no prize for winners (okay, maybe there is a secret prize... but you'll have to wait until the end of the competition to find out what it is), and no shame in being dead last.  I'll probably be right there at the bottom of the list with you.  The important thing is to take those first steps... and then keep on going.

I'll be posting encouragement throughout the competition, and I'll mention the top few walkers at the end of each week.

Oh, and this thing is based on the honor system, so you can post whatever number of steps you want and nobody will be the wiser.  But what's the fun in cheating? 

A bunch of people have already signed up and space is limited to 150 participants (for now), so what are you waiting for?  Go get your pedometer (or change the battery if you already have one gathering dust in a drawer somewhere) and sign up!

[Note to the cell phone industry: Steal This Idea! -  How hard would it be to put a pedometer in the cell phones you design?  A cell phone is something that most people carry all day long anyway... so wouldn't a pedometer be a neat (and inexpensive) feature that might help the general population slim down.  Don't thank me... I'm a giver. ]