Unbelievable Steps ! Book of Records !

[Jabrat]

[Dominique]

Yes, it's unbelievable, and I won't believe it until I see their daily activity graph. You know, this thing:

The above is from my own personal best step day, "only" 53k steps. When you have peaks of irregular length and different colors, you know these are real steps, not logged ones.

But let's do some basic math. Let's say I have above-average endurance and I can not only run a marathon for breakfast, but a second one for dinner as well. Walking is for losers, and since I must cram 100k steps in my day in any decent amount of time, I need to run, not walk. My running stride length is 0.95 meters. A marathon is 42,200 meters, so running one gets me 44,421 steps. I'll run my two daily marathons in 4 hours each: that's 10.5 km/h, twice as slow as the world record owner, but still a decent time for the average Joe, especially considering I'm going to run 14 marathons during my week. So here is my typical day: wake up at 4 am, run first marathon, back at home at 8 am, shower, breakfast, commute to work (I'm lucky, I have a 9-to-5 job and I live close enough from my workplace), manage to get another 10k steps during my workday, back at home at 5.30 pm, change clothes, quick dinner and ready to start my 2nd marathon at 6 pm. Run 2nd marathon, back at home at 10 pm, hit bed immediately (hey, must be ready to start over again at 4 am the next morning). That got me almost 99k step. I do this from Monday to Friday, but that still "only" gives me 495k steps, and I need to get 743k to make it to the top of my Fitbit leaderboard, so I still need 248k during the weekend. No problem, I'll run a semi-marathon on top of my two daily marathons. The remaining 13k steps I'll get just by moving around, since I'm such an active person. Oh, and what about rest days? Well, again resting is for losers; I'm a super-human: I can do this day after day, week after week, month after month, without getting any rest, being injured etc. Now, how credible does all this sound?

[loveabull]

I have no idea, but **ahem** you're good with numbers!

[Smitti85]

When looking at that graph I see 3 colours I was just wondering what they ment?

[lonerchick]

I'm confused. Are you shaming, accusing or congratulating? Serious question.

[Dominique]

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@lonerchick wrote:
I'm confused. Are you shaming, accusing or congratulating? Serious question.

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I'm not accusing (what anyone does with their Fitbit is their own business). I'm just saying it is very unlikely someone can achieve this kind of daily/weekly step counts by actually walking/running.

Using a fake account, I attempted to manually log imaginary runs/walks so as to achieve the same step count as on my personal best so far. I also tried to spread these activities in a similar way as what I actually did in real life. Here is what the corresponding activity graph looks like for that day:

For convenience reasons, I "parked" my low intensity steps as a single activity at the end of the day. As you can see, manually logged step activities have same height / same color bars for the whole length of the activity. Each bar represents your step count during a five-minute time period. In real life, you will never be able to achieve exactly the same step count in consecutive five-minute slices, no matter how hard you try to walk/run at exactly the same pace. This is why I said I won't believe the "unbelievable" step counts until these people prove me wrong by showing their daily activity graph, as I did.

[Dominique]

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@Smitti85 wrote:
When looking at that graph I see 3 colours I was just wondering what they ment?

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It's the intensity of your activity: red = low, yellow = moderately active, green = very active.

[lonerchick]

Sorry my question was for Jabrat. I can't seem to quote on the ipad.

[hikerpt]

I loved this explaination/ calculation.  I had a fitbit for a while and joined an "over 50" group of menopausal women.  Some stayed atop the leaderboard 24/7 with an average of 22-24 miles walked each day for over 2 years and 3 hours of high activity daily.  This level of activity (if it were true) is not possible for young olympic athletes much less "over 50 menopausal women".  It frustrated me because I wanted to belong to a community who were honestly challenging each other... not cheating the fitbit.  So... I gave my fitbit away and got another tracker.  Maybe I'll get one again.  I did like the device. 

Anyway, thanks for the great post. 

[DominicJ]

Its possible, It would require a lot of dedication (mostly time), but its possible.

Not to say they didnt cheat.

[Dmfrenchie]

I can log 23-26k a day on a really good week when I set my time up for it. I earned a personal best of 45k last week. I just cannot understand people who are earning an average over 50k, 60k or even 100k a day! That would be their only activity- ultra-marathoning every day.

[shipo]

Yeah, pretty good bet they were bold-faced cheating.  I ran with an Ultra team in the Reach the Beach Relay a couple of years ago (pre-Fitbit), and my old-fashioned digital pedometer logged just over 55,000 steps in a 24 hour period (32.8 miles running and lots of walking to cheer on my teammates).  Funny thing, even with all of the running I do, I have yet to crack the 40,000 step in a calendar day threshold.

[ShellieR]

Found this thread in a Google search to see how long it would take to log 70k steps, and for what it's worth my personal best is just over 40k in a day. My runner friends goes longer distances but gets fewer steps. I'm pretty sure it's because your stride is longer when you run. 

[DanielleinDC]

My personal best that I recall is around 31,000 steps. And that's when I was in NYC and running around all day. We did a LOT of walking. We're going back in another two and a half weeks or so. I'm going to try to break that. 

[Heather-S]

My personal best is only a little over 30K.  I planned it for a Saturday and decided that it would be easier to break it up over a 15 hour period (5am to 7pm) and I'd need to walk 2,000 steps every hour to stay on target.  It was hard!  It was hot and humid outside, so eventually I had to retreat to the gym for steps.  

I'm glad I did it and I would love to beat that record.  I was pretty dead after that.  My ultimate goal would be the Ruby Slippers badge (65K steps in a day) because it's just so pretty!  🙂  But I don't know if I can manage that!  I'd settle for a Snow Boots (45K) badge though!

[lavabelle]

my highest so far is 35, 000 steps...and that took over 5 hours of continuous walking...if I could sustain that for 15 hours...I would hit 105, 000 steps. Doable but would be extremely hard...if I were running I could cut that in half and hit 105,000 in 7.5 - 8 hours of continuous running theoretically...if you're hitting 400, 000 steps...you're full on running (6 mph) for 30 hours...hmmm...isn't there only 24 hours in a day? also 6 mph is crazy fast for that distance...

[Dominique]

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@lavabelle wrote:

if I were running I could cut that in half

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The thing is, you don’t get twice as many steps while running. You got 35,000 steps in 5 hours (walking), which is 7000 steps/hour (realistic): you won’t get 14,000 steps/hour while running. You can check this by recording a 15-minute run on your Fitbit (if it supports on-device recording of activities).

[lavabelle]

I don't think I was implying that I got more steps running than walking for the same amount of time...but now I'm curious...I will definitely check that out. Thanks for pointing that out.

I based my theorical calculation on time. It takes me two hours to walk 10 km and just under one hour to run 10 km ( those are my actual times) so based on distance and time I could cover twice as much distance running than walking, therefore I assumed I would do more steps overall by running because I cover more distance in the same amount of time...but my logic might be totally flawed 😂