My doctor gave me a number this month: 3,000. As in steps, per day, as in a new study linking that amount of walking to less buildup of the proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, and to nearly half the cognitive and functional decline in older adults at risk. Thirty minutes of moderate walking. I have never in my life been given a goal this perfect, and I have never been more motivated to do a small thing with total seriousness.
The number is magnificent because it is not 10,000. Ten thousand steps is a lifestyle, a personality, a pair of shoes you buy at an airport. Three thousand is a task. Three thousand is a prescription in the original sense: written down, specific, and non-negotiable, and I intend to obey it precisely. I will walk 3,000 steps. I will not walk 3,001. The study said 3,000, and nobody, nobody, is going to make me walk one more step than the science asked for. I am 51 years old and I have finally found a health plan built on the same principle as my tax filing: exact compliance, maximal smugness.
The logistics are simple and I have made them complicated, as is required. The living room is 31 steps end to end, a figure I measured with a tape measure on Saturday and 97 steps in the kitchen-to-front-door line, which is the marathon route. My husband says I pace “like a man rehearsing a will.” My daughter has started leaving her shoes in the hallway to add steps to my count, which is sabotage, and which I have not reported, because she is nine and the study is about old people.
The neighborhood has taken notice. A man on my street, seeing me walk to the mailbox at 6:40 a.m. with the focus of an accountant, stopped his car to ask if I was all right. I told him the number. He rolled up the window. By Wednesday there were four of us on the block walking in a loose, silent, mutually hostile line toward the elementary school, because the school has the flat sidewalks, and because a prescription is the most contagious disease in suburbia. The county, at this rate, will have a 3,000-Step Club by spring, with a banner, and a funeral in September for the man who organized it.
There is a temptation, in all things American, to escalate: to buy the watch, the app, the $400 insoles, the coach. I resist. The doctor did not say run. The study did not say the 10,000. Science handed this generation, which has done everything at 100 percent intensity and quit by February, a number so modest it can be met in socks, in the dark, in a living room, with a casserole getting cold behind you.
Tonight at dinner the counter read 2,978. I looked at the potatoes. I did not touch the potatoes. I stood up, walked the kitchen-to-front-door line, and sat back down at 3,004, which is a rounding error, and which the study, in the end, will have to live with.