Counting my steps
When injury limits movement, it's an opportunity to reevaluate what matters
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646.
That’s how many steps my phone tells me I logged yesterday.
“There have been changes in your active energy, distance, and steps trends,” Apple Health helpfully notifies me. No kidding. Including the “lazy” days when I don’t leave the house, I’ve logged about 10,000 steps a day on average over the past 6 months, with 14-16K days being pretty common.
The last day I really walked, in fact - the Saturday before last - I logged 14,963 steps, the vast majority of which occurred before I badly sprained my ankle around 3:30 PM.
Since then, “walking” has mostly consisted of crutch-assisted shuffling to and from sedentary places: sofa to kitchen to sofa. Bed to bathroom and back.
Over the past couple of days I’ve branched out a bit, even making my way to the car the last two mornings so I could drive Clara to school. But for the most part, my walking life - at least, according to my watch - has dwindled to the minimum necessity dictates.
It’s frustrating to be dependent and immobilized, yes; but there’s something more to it than simple frustration and boredom—something more akin to a loss of identity: I am, and have always been, someone who prefers to stay in motion, and my preferred movement is walking.
I think while I walk. I dream while I walk. I listen to the birds and the lake and my favorite podcasts while I walk. I sometimes write entire essays in my head while I walk. I walk to see the world. I walk to clear my head. I walk simply to walk.
Who am I, if not a person who keeps propelling forward on two feet?
Adding to the sense of loss are those “helpful” notifications from my watch, reminding me of the daily steps goal it once assigned to me - 12440, which it has not adjusted downward in the week-plus since I last took an unassisted step. How smart can this watch possibly be, I wonder, to keep optimistically feeding me a goal so untethered to reality?
I have a love-hate relationship with trackers and the gamification of…well, everything, but particularly my health. When things are going well - when I’m racking up the steps, when I feel energized and pain-free and my life provides enough margin for me to purposely park several hundred steps further away from my destination than I need to, just so I can walk more - I love it. But when I’m sore, or tired, or injured (which, no surprise, is happening more frequently as I age) or simply sidelined by the busy-ness of life, I start to feel like I’m falling behind.
Logging “only” 6000 or 7000 steps in a day can feel like a disappointing showing, no matter how lovely and life-giving those steps were. Getting in fewer than 1000 a day, like I am right now? A total failure, no matter how necessary the slowdown.
But in spite of my mixed feelings, I’ve kept the trackers turned on, because (like most of us, I imagine) I’ve become addicted to the reminders and reinforcement. When things are going well, it seems those dopamine hits motivate me toward the kind of person I most want to be, a constant flow of “get it, girl” vibes.
When I think about it more deeply, though, I realize that what I actually crave is a life so grounded and nourishing that I no longer need a steady stream of tech-fueled neurotransmitters to keep me going in the first place.
Later this week, I hope to take my first few tentative steps without the aid of crutches. If all goes well, in another week or two I might be heading back out for a bona fide walk, just in time for early fall leaf-crunching.
But I know it will be a long while before I’m logging 14,000 or 15,000 steps on a typical day. I will need to conserve my steps, to make the most of them: to prioritize quality over quantity, for which my watch has no mechanism to track.
After successfully dropping Clara off at school yesterday, I felt ambitious enough to plan some more upright adventures. At first my list was large: I’d get the oil changed in the car, hit up the farm stand, then swing by the library, then come home and figure out how to clean out the produce drawers of the fridge while balanced on one foot.
But after the oil change, I could already feel my ankle swelling and my energy waning - and I realized that my goals might have been just a bit too lofty. Just one thing stood out to me as absolutely necessary: sending a gift and handwritten note to a friend who’s been struggling with her own health in ways I can’t begin to imagine.
When I think about it more deeply, though, I realize that what I actually crave is a life so grounded and nourishing that I no longer need a steady stream of tech-fueled neurotransmitters to keep me going in the first place.
So I scratched out most of my list, and headed out to mail the package. Then I took to the sofa for most of the rest of the day. Between some 60 shuffling crutch-swings into the post office and 60 back out to the car, in the end I devoted nearly 20% of my total step count to just one errand.
How sheepish I felt, then, when I thought about how many completely able-bodied days I’ve spent not making space for small but important tasks like this one.
I guess I could have, but I was too busy counting my steps.
Limits have a way of forcing us to really show up for what matters most. When one starts a day with the realization that it impossible (or at least unwise) to attempt to do everything, it’s interesting how easy it becomes to identify the most important things…or sometimes, simply, one thing. Just one thing done per day can count for a lot, if it’s the right thing to do. If it’s done with connection and care. If we even notice having done it in the first place.
This morning, for the first time in ten days, I was able to briefly balance my full weight between my two feet. Already those feet are itching to hit the sidewalk of my usual walking route, to propel me easily through the grocery store or simply across the room. And amid all the distractions of my very modern life, tools like a step tracker can be a useful way of reminding me to prioritize walking over, say, social media scrolling.
But the slow and often-frustrating experience of healing has been a good reminder that the point of life isn’t really the number of steps I take in a given day, and while my watch’s notifications are very good at hijacking the reward center in my brain, digital trophies are not the same thing as an actual reward.
Right now my life is, by necessity, stripped down to only the most essential steps: a brief opportunity to reevaluate what I was doing with the 10,000+ I took most days before, and what I plan to do with the steps I’ll soon begin to add back into my life. Maybe the number of steps isn’t the point so much as where my legs take me - and how, and why; and how they add up to the life I want to live.
And, with apologies to my fairly intelligent watch, that’s something technology just can’t measure.
Thinking of you, Meagan, and hoping that each day leads to more healing.
Praying for quick healing! I am thankful that you are willing to be vulnerable and share your difficult circumstances in such a profound and helpful way. I too have been uncomfortably slowed down by similar situations and resonate with the struggle of the low step count. 🩵