More than an year ago, I had installed the pedometer app "Step Set Go" on my cell phone. That started giving me a track of how much I walk on daily and weekly basis. Except occasional misses, my walking has been more or less consistent throughout 2020 and here are the consolidated numbers for the year.
It shows I clocked an average of 8 km per day. And 2,925 km's of walking in the year of 2020. This number surprised me for a while. If I could reach this number walking for less than 2 hours a day, what about those travelers in the past who almost walked from one town to another throughout the year? History documents many travelers like Marco Polo who had traveled from Europe to Mongolia twice on foot (mostly). And the Chinese traveler to India - Hiuen Tsang, who had walked thousands of kilometers. I had always wondered how they could achieve this and why they did not get tired out? Now my own statistics shows that walking few thousand kilometers a year is an easily achievable task. Just one needs to be willing and consistent.
Biology and Evolution indicate that human body is designed or evolved for walking. Our legs are way stronger than our hands. It shows our ancestors used legs more often than hands that made legs pack higher muscular power. As the transition from monkey to humans happened and our ancestors climbed down from tree to land, our feet structure got shaped differently than other four legged animals, helping us to stand up and not yet lose balance. That improved our survival rate as we could walk long distances searching for food. Though we took shelter in agriculture for food later, legs were the primary mode of transporting oneself. Though man tamed horses and invented bullock carts, majority of the population still walked. This continued till bicycles and later motor cars helped us improve our moving speeds and gradually replaced walking in the recent past. Our current generation rarely walks to work but our bodies which got shaped through thousands of years of evolution demand us to walk (or do any other physical exercise) to keep up in a better shape. No wonder what was natural to us in the past has become Doctor's prescription to keep us fit again.
Though walking has been part of my routine for many years, I was not this consistent before and did not record the statistics either. The year of pandemic made me more health conscious and the app on the phone helped me keep a track of the numbers and form a perspective. What is your fitness regime?
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