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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
You can always recognise these people. You see them pacing as you wait with them for a lift. Or moving back and forth at the station, every stride chipping away at the target. Why waste five minutes standing still on a District line platform when you could probably knock off a cheeky few hundred steps?
You just know that if they’ve managed only 9,700 by the time they get home, they will be pacing the kitchen until their counter hits five figures. And, of course, they are only too happy, desperate even, to explain this erratic behaviour. “I’m getting my steps in,” they’ll tell you, smiling away at their own virtue and announcing their success with all the gravity of a quarterly earnings call.
It’s obviously a good thing, but once upon a time we just referred to it as walking. Now, that’s far too self-indulgent. Going out at lunchtime “for a walk” marks you out as a bit of a dilettante, someone who is probably using the time to write a sonnet or listen to The Rest is History. But getting your steps, well, that suggests a person of purpose, action, metrics.
Until recently, this was just another alien tribe to me, but the recovery instructions from a minor leg operation specified that I join the 10k steppers. I am adult enough to know that this is not a scientific target. Nine thousand would do the job. The requirement is designed to get me up from my chair rather than sell smartwatches. Indeed the 10k target sprang from a 1960s ad campaign for a Japanese pedometer. But it is more motivational than “walk a lot”.
And, like Parkrun or Strava, it also offers opportunities to announce your commitment to health. It’s a little like those people who, unasked, volunteer the news that they went on a 10-mile run at the weekend, only less impressive. Actually, I find the answer to the “I ran 10 miles” boast is to ask sympathetically if there were no buses. The joggers seek out others to impress in the future.
But suddenly, I have become one of those pointless pacers I mentioned earlier. There are only so many steps in my commute, even walking as I now do to the further train station. But a lap around the newsroom will get me another 200. Do it five times a day, spaced out so as not to look demented, and that’s a thousand steps. I’ve always considered the three-minute walk from the tube to my office to be a negligible distance, but I know now it’s worth nearly 400 steps. With a slight detour to Pret, there and back is another thousand. That’s 20 per cent of my target ticked off without actually doing anything.
Are you bored yet? Because I can go on. Seriously, you don’t want to test me on this. I can be even less interesting than I am when I go on a diet. Ask me how many steps to the high street and back. Go on, I dare you. The dog ought to be of value here but she stops so often that she’s still not the most efficient use of my minutes. The other frustration is that my phone lags a bit in counting so I always worry I might do more by accident and I’m not allowed to carry them over.
But where do stepcasters (pedo-people has too much scope for misunderstanding) stand in the pantheon of domestic bores? Certainly higher than people who talk too much about their children or show pictures of their pets. There are at least people who like pets — and children, come to think of it. They are also worse than general exercise bores. A proper workout is, at least, demanding and so perhaps earns a brief boast, if you are the kind of person who considers sweating an achievement. (Former Prince Andrew, perhaps.)
The steppers are, I think, better than diet bores. This is because in the end there is not that much you can say after the first announcement, whereas those who are trying to lose weight have masses of information with which to try your patience and are routinely impossible when you dine out.
I’m not sure where Ozempic bores stand in this hierarchy. People are interested in the side-effects and how it’s working for you, but then again all you did was get an injection. And I wouldn’t go round telling others about my flu jab.
The solution clearly lies in one of those Covid-style slogans to guide us on the etiquette. Something like “step out, count off, shut up”. Think of them as your marching orders.
Email Robert at magazineletters@ft.com
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