A mercifully short-lived fad swept the U.S. in the early 1960s. It seems one day an aide to President Kennedy discovered a memo from President Theodore Roosevelt to the Marine Corps stating all Marines should be able to walk or march 50 miles in three days.
Kennedy, who put personal emphasis on vigor, liked the idea, mentioned it at a Cabinet meeting, then in a moment of presidential one-upmanship announced he expected his Marines make the trek in one day, not three.
The president and his brothers were highly competitive with each other. At the end of the meeting Attorney General Robert Kennedy told his chief assistant and two others to meet him at 5 the next morning to go for a 50-mile walk in one day. Without any preparation or training, the four took off first thing next day.
About 25 miles into the trek, two of them dropped out. At mile 35, a television news helicopter flew over, and despite being exhausted, Kennedy had “only” another 15 miles to go and finished the course.
Fortunately for the rest of us, other things caught our national attention and 50-mile hikes were forgotten.
The next year, with Olympics slated in Tokyo, a Japanese company that had developed a pedometer that pinged when walkers reached 10,000 steps advertised it internationally. It reset itself at midnight so walkers good begin a new challenge the next day.
Like the Kennedy brothers, many Americans could not resist a competitive challenge and snapped up all the pedometers. With it began the 10,000 steps for good health that remains today.
It is said you can reduce your chances of a heart attack by another 15 percent for every 1,000 steps you take beyond the minimum of 10,000 up to 20,000 steps or so, which seems the limit of at which such benefits can be realized.
The way I figure it, I am going to be around forever. I started counting all of the percentages that supposedly will extend my life and added them up myself.
I always have four or five, but never more than six, cups of coffee each day. Right there is 15 percent to the positive. Five servings of fruit and vegetables a day is good for another 10 percent. I sleep about seven hours a night, good for 10 percent more; wear seatbelts when driving, never drive when tired and so on, more points.
In no time I got to 100 percent of living forever. I kept going and raised it to about 160. Now, I just walk 15,000 steps a day, I will be so healthy there is no chance I will ever fall off my perch.
Today’s pedometers can track not only how many steps and the distance a person walks, but the number of minutes spent exercising, heart rate, blood pressure and much more. The new models can upload all of your personal information to the Cloud for retrieval later.
Nor is that old chestnut about getting eight hours of sleep a night necessarily true. The amount varies from one person to the next. Over time fewer than six and a half a night is dangerous, more than 10 a night raises chances of serious heart trouble.
A lot of free medical advice is floating around, much of it worth exactly what we pay for it. All things in moderation is the best advice.