PEDOMETER CRAZE IS TAKEN IN STRIDE

Today I will log between 5,708 and 5,980 steps on my pedometer before noon.

I share this because I am in search of anyone who might care.

You don’t care. I realize that—really I do—but now that I’m counting my every footfall, I need you to try.

Before a pedometer dug into my waistband, I would not have expected you to care. You have bills to pay, dinners to plan, and a slew of questions about the future of Social Security. Why would you care about the number of times my pendulum mechanism registered the g-shock of my foot strike?

G-shock, by the way, is pedometer parlance for gravity-shock. To paraphrase writer David Sedaris: Me talk so pretty these days.

All those fitness gurus who encourage you to clamp a pedometer to your waist never warn you about the way it changes you. Oh, they crow about all the burned calories, the plummeting cholesterol counts, the thrill of indoor mileage. But they never mention that you inevitably will succumb to that most annoying of human afflictions:

You will want to brag. A lot. And this bad habit creeps up on you like the mile-a-minute vine of Georgia kudzu.

You e-mail your spouse every hour with your latest trot tally because he, too, wears a pedometer, and what started out as something fun to do has become Marital Olympics.

Then you map out the longest route to the office washroom and feel the need to explain exactly why to every colleague you run into along the way. You dismiss their rolled eyes and exchanged glances as g-shock envy of the sedentary.

Before you know it, you are lifting the hem of your sweater in front of total strangers in the checkout line so you can glance down at your pedometer and say with a chuckle, “Well, whaddya know, I just walked another 412 steps in this here grocery store.”

You learn things about people after they take to wearing a pedometer. One of my friends is as even-tempered as they come, or so I thought until she started wearing a high-tech digital pedometer that’s about as big as a minicam. I ran into her on my new route to the ladies’ room and asked her how many steps she’d logged so far. She raised her arm and reached for her hip like Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke.

“Let’s see,” she said, pressing a button, “I have walked…”

She gasped.

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

“Oh, I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

She looked at me as if I had just handed her a ransom note demanding a wad of unmarked tens and twenties if she ever wanted to see her children again.

“I just deleted how many steps I’ve walked today.”

It was late afternoon, so I figured she must have already checked her pedometer about forty-two times that day.

“Can’t you estimate based on what it was five minutes ago?”

She shook her head. “That would be cheating.”

That hit a nerve, I must say, as I’ve devised quite the system for racking up steps here and there without ever lifting my foot from the floor, and I refuse to call that cheating.

My U-turn on the road to self-deception started after I hit a pothole on Chester Avenue and felt a little blip of movement at my waist. Sure enough, I checked my pedometer, and its nice, big numbers said I’d walked two more steps. Just like that.

When I laughed, it blipped again. Another step! In all, I logged fourteen steps from home to downtown without even setting my two-toned pumps on solid ground.

Ah, there’s nothing like the swell of superiority that renders you light-headed when your pedometer clicks as you pass someone sitting at a computer in a workplace just brimming with such moments of immobility. And I just found out that some pedometers can talk.

I don’t know what they say, but you can bet I’m going to find out.

I’m hoping for something that coos, “Look at your fine self step-step-stepping your way to fitness. One step, two steps, three steps, look at you go…”

Finally, someone will care.