So late last year, a friend and coworker of mine helped me to set up the Health app on my phone. Among other things, it keeps track of how many steps and miles I walk each day, at least while I have the phone with me. This has been a semi-regular feature - one which I regularly turn to - since not long after getting home from my previous trip last year, to South Africa (and with two excursion days to London).
Now, it admittedly took me some time to really get used to it enough to fully take advantage. But once the spring came, I began to devote more of an effort to really walk. And with something on my person keeping track of my steps and miles walked, it became a bit easier to monitor my progress (or sometimes, admittedly, the lack thereof).
There was a stretch of 10 straight days when I walked six miles or more each day, and I managed to eclipse that a few weeks later with another streak of 21 days in a row reaching the six miles walked mark.
However, the most that I had recorded myself walking from late last year to prior to this past trip to Europe was maybe a little over eight miles.
All of that changed almost right away, on the very first day in Europe. While visiting Lisbon in Portugal, I recorded what was at that point a new record of 9.51 miles.
Wow!, I thought. My first day on vacation in Europe, and right away, I set a new record?
Little did I know that was only the beginning.
Now, I had a very early flight the next morning. It was to take off right around six in the morning, with the boarding scheduled for just after five in the morning. Not wanting to run the risk of being late, I figured it might be wiser simply to stay the night at the airport. And cheaper too, of course.
So when I got back to the airport, maybe around 10 PM that evening (22:00), and I saw how many miles I had apparently walked that day, a part of me was tempted to walk just a little bit more. You know, round it off to 10, right?
But I was tired. It was not just having walked 9.51 miles that day, but also not having slept, as I had taken a red eye flight overnight, and gotten almost no sleep. Then, standing in line for almost 2 1/2 hours in the hot airport just to get past customs, and then spending still more time trying to locate either baggage storage or lockers, with different people giving me very different directions.
A part of me wanted to reach the 10 miles, of course. I should probably push myself, went that line of thinking. After all, when am I going to get this close to 10 miles again?
You see, it was my first time in Lisbon. Not being overly familiar with the metro system, or the city of Lisbon, I imagined that there had likely been more walking and going up and down stairs than was strictly necessary. Because those conflicting directions had not been restricted just to the airport. There were similar incidents during my admittedly brief visit to Lisbon. Paris, by contrast, I was considerably more familiar with. And so, it seemed to me, I surely would not walk this much again when I visited some place which I was much more familiar with.
As it turns out, though, I was wrong. That newly established record of 9.51 miles stood for just two days. That had come on a Tuesday. On Thursday, May 22nd, I walked 12.08 miles, which I believe set an all-time record for most amount of walking in one day that I had ever done, or at least recorded. There had been one day, many years ago, when I roughly recorded around 11 miles on a day at Wawayanda State Park in northwestern New Jersey. But I had been guesstimating, because I had more or less calculated the distances. And that had been my previous record.
The day after that, I walked exactly 10 miles, at least recorded, on Friday. It would likely have been more than that, but that was the day when I went to Charles De Gaulle Airport to pick up my car rental. And while there was some walking the rest of the day, I could never really stray far from the car. Still, the early walking mixed with the late contributions culminated in a 10 mile walking day, which ranked second, just behind the 12.08 miles I had put in the day before.
Yet the most amount of walking in a single day was yet to come. It turned out that my second to last day, which was a week ago exactly (Tuesday, May 27th) would be the day when I managed an all-time record. On that day, I recorded 14,149 steps, which was 14.08 miles. In truth, I had just gotten past 14 miles when I got back, exhausted, to the tiny hotel room. When I saw how close I was to breaking the "old" record from just a few days earlier by exactly two miles, I paced around the room until I got 14.08, despite my physical fatigue.
The funny thing is that I had almost specifically designed the day to be relaxing. I slept in that morning. When I finally went out, just before ten in the morning, I did a little bit of visiting, a good amount of walking, then returned to the hotel to take a brief break, but wound up taking a nap instead. It was fairly late - probably about four in the afternoon - when I finally went out again, and mostly tried to visit as many of the things which I really wanted to visit on my last full day in Paris as possible. Which I managed to do, but it required a lot of walking.
What all of that translates to is that each of my top four days in terms of recorded steps and miles walked with that app on my cell phone all came during my trip of slightly more than one week in length. Not surprisingly, this was yet another trip during which I actually lost weight. That seems to be a trend with me for trips, for several reasons. It also is one of the reasons why I look forward to trips.
Anyway, it seemed like something worth mentioning here. Below are some of the recorded distances walked during my recent trip to Europe.
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