Treadmill desk - 1 month down!

With the full knowledge of how bad a sedentary lifestyle is and, in an effort to get my butt out of the chair more often, I decided, after talking to LoveCat Bronwyn Jameson who also has one, I was going to get a treadmill desk.

My hubby suggested to just get a standing desk but I figured if I was going to stand I might as well walk, right?

I've had my treadmill desk for a month today.


This is how it arrived -

This was the sexy dude who put it together for me. I think I'll keep him :-)

This is it, all pristine and new and ready to go. It looks quite glorious in the sunshine there, doesn't it? Welcoming. Beckoning, even. Go on, step on, you know you want to try me....

And this is me on it the other day. Multi-tasking my butt off. Tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming. Answering emails. Checking out Amazon and Goodreads and generally spending two hours a day on it doing my usual rounds of social media/procrastinaton enabling tools.

They recommend that you go 2k/hr as a good walking/typing speed but its actually much slower than my normal walking pace so it was just too weird. I walk at 4k/hr and its just right. I'm not writing any creative words, mind. Just short social media stuff. I dont think it would work for me actually trying to write. I'd definitely have to slow it down more just for the typos and I think I'd get frustrated with the speed. But I've gone from maybe walking 2k/day three days a week on my street walks and doing about 3-8k steps according to my fitbit to walking 8k most days (4-6 on interrupted days) and achiving about 14 -15k steps every day.

Do I feel fit and healthy and vital and springing around with energy?Umm...no. Maybe that'll come. But I know it's good for me and I really like being able to walk so many k's without feeling like I'm doing any exercise (which I really really hate!) all while accomplishing the things I would normally do sitting on my butt. There's something about the efficiency that is addictive to this multi-tasking addict. 

So its win/win all round for me. I'm just hoping I stick with it and its not some fad that will soon lose its gloss....

What about you? Ever been on a diet or a fitness kick or started a new hobby only to have the gloss wear off and abandon it a few weeks later. I know I have....

I Have Walked One Hundred Miles

by Bronwyn Jameson

Last month I blogged about my new acquisition, a treadmill desk which I hoped would be the ultimate multi-tasking, time-saving tool: working and exercising at the same time.  Huzzah.  Four weeks later I am reporting, as promised, on how that is working out.

In order to report, I've been recording my daily stat's...although I didn't realise until a couple of weeks in that the default setting is miles and not kilometres.  According to the manual, I can switch to metric but since I'd started recording miles I decided to stick with miles.  Also, the Proclaimers' song is a jaunty walking singalong in miles, not kilometres. (Sorry if the title has created Scottish ear-worms!)

So.  My report.

I've walked while working on 20 days for a total of 60-and-a-bit hours, averaging 3 hours walking per day.  Fewer hours than I would like, so I am setting a goal of getting this up to 4 hours per day during May.

The good news is that during those 60 hours, I have walked almost 335,000 steps and 106 miles.  Hence the title of this post: I really *have* walked one hundred miles (and a few more) during April.  Cool, right?

My average speed works out at 1.76 miles per hour which is quite a dawdle.  My farmer husband says even sheep walk faster than this but they're not typing while they walk, are they?  Nor are they scribbling notes and pausing to consult the thesaurus and coming up with brilliant (or not) character motivations. Anyway...

According to the treadmill, my month of dawdling has burned a total of 4,618 calories.  Let me put that in terms we all understand.

Suffice to say that 4,618 calories is quite a few slices of cheesecake or scoops of ice-cream or pastries or chocolates but actually I've been eating less of these.  Partly it's the walking, partly it's the recording of numbers, partly it's knowing how far and for how long I need to walk to make up for the cheesecake.  I've been eating less snacky foods, drinking less coffee and sleeping better. Bonus: I've  lost a satisfying two kilograms without trying too hard.

It did take most of the month to reach a level of comfort with typing while I walk.  If I had been able to work at it every day, for several sessions every day, then I'm sure this settling-in would have been quicker.  But this past week I've been able to lose myself in the work, to not realise that I'm walking, to not notice that an hour or more has passed since I last checked the clock.

Give me another month and I will have this working-while-I-walk mastered.  That is the plan.

PS:  I've become slightly addicted to the numbers, to adding them to my spreadsheet and watching them add up, so I may continue recording for a wee while longer.