"A (virtual) journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"

Last year lots of workplaces turned their team’s step counts into miles and went on their travels! This is a great way to keep yourselves motivated over the 8 weeks and gives you a target to work towards. So, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on how to create a virtual journey.

I should say, we deliberately left this part of the challenge up to you. Workplaces are taking part from allover the country and each will have their own reasons for taking part and we didn’t want to be too prescriptive. We wanted you to make the challenge your own!

So, here are 5 steps to creating your own virtual journey…

1. Decide how far you’re going to walk
You’ll need to work out what is a realistic target for the 8 weeks. Use your pedometer to work out roughly how far your team walks in a day (remember you can also include weekends). To do this, record your step counts over 3 days. Add the 3 numbers up and divide by 3 and round up to the nearest 500. For example, if I walked 3,578 steps on Thursday, 4,527 on Friday and 9,872 on Saturday my total would be 17,977 making my average daily step count 5,992 and rounded up to the nearest 500 this would be 6,000.

For the purposes of the challenge we’re saying that 1 mile is around 2,000 steps, give or take. Working on the average of 6,000 steps a day I’d be walking approximately 3 miles each day.

Using this information you should be able to work out how many miles each team member could cover over the 8 weeks. You might want to increase the target slightly to motivate you to find ways of walking more, but keep it realistic!

2. “To infinity, and beyond!”
The destination is up to you. It might be work related, if your company is national you may want to work out a route that stops off at a number of office locations. You might want to go international and visit some tourist hotspots. You might want to have a topical theme such as the Commonwealth or Olympic Games.

Last year, our office converted steps into miles and walked some of Scotland’s famous long distance trails including the West Highland Way and Great Glen Way.

3. Map Your Route
There are a number of websites you can use to work out distances. Here are a few links:

www.bikehike.co.uk  
www.mapmywalk.com
www.walkit.com

4. Chart Your Progress
Think about how you could chart your progress. You could pin a route map to the office notice board or send your team a short email update each week. This is a good way to keep staff motivated and to spur them on to keep walking.

Last year, we stuck a map of Scotland to our notice board and photographed it for our weekly updates. As you’ll see below we also shared our step counts, which created a bit of healthy competition!

5. Celebrate Milestones
Celebrate reaching significant milestones, like reaching 100 miles, or a particular destination. You could buy some little prizes, or perhaps have a nice lunch. You could write something for your staff newsletter or even send an article in to your local paper.

We’d also like to hear from you. We’ll publish your stories and pictures here on the blog. In return we’ll send you and your team some Walk at Work merchandise as a thank you.