Having recently watched ’supersize me’ I thought I’d at least start monitoring my toxin intake and exercise level so today I bought a Micro Pedometer. In the store there was a choice of three pedometers, all with exactly the same bullet points on the back, and at $16, $22 and $27. The $27 model was all bells and whistles and looked a little cumbersome, so it was between the other two. They could not be differentiated by the blurb on their boxes so I bought the cheaper. I then drove for probably over an hour looking for where my day’s hike was supposed to be starting from, so time was pressing on by the time I got to try out my new acquisition. I carefully calibrated it with wild guesses at my step length and my weight and thought, at least it’ll give me a step count, which is a good relative measure of day-on-day activity. So I clipped it on my belt and walked 20 paces. A quick check: yep, it had registered at least 5 of them… hmmm…
Well, on a rocky uphill it registered 60 out of 200 steps, and on a smooth descent, 15 out of 100. So in other words, just go for a walk, then at the end multiply the pedometer reading by, oo somewhere between 3 and 8, and you’ll have the distance you walked. Great. Fortunately, I found clipping it to my shoe gave a far more favourable reading, being within 10% of actual number of paces in a few checks I made. This was a little bizarre, as I’d expect my left foot to experience roughly half as many steps as my belt might. Ho hum.
So in answer to the rhetorical question I asked myself in the shop, THAT’s possibly the difference between a $16 pedometer and a $22 pedometer.
I probably won’t even try to get my money back as I bought it out of town and it was in one of those cunning packs that you have to all but destroy to get it open. What’s the bets the shop return policy is only in resaleable quality…
Addendum: Today’s step count was 5261. I was supposed to walk 3.2 miles on this hike, but having spent Saturday in bed with some kind of delerious cold-sweat fever thing, my legs started going like new-born bambi about 2/3 of the way up the mountain, so I turned back and wibbled back to the car.