By the end of Week 1, I had high confidence that I could win this Pedometer Challenge, and had decided not only to meet my 11,000-step-per-day goals, but to actually compete for a prize. After all, I had amassed over 190,000 steps. K. James had amassed 123,602, but surely, with my 66,398-step lead, I could beat him with ease, right? WRONG. K. James was holding off somewhat in the first week, but on the first day of the second week, he did two things:

1. He walked 50,330 steps on a Monday (i.e. on a weekday, not a weekend, when everyone is expected to be able to walk more steps). And then proceeded to take a total of 262,925 steps during that week!
2. He wrote a note on his spreadsheet (under the totals) that said "New Goal: 1,000,000 steps for the month[.] Up for the challenge? C. Wetzel, I'm talking to you."

So the second week, I watched, depressed, as my lead shrank, and finally, K. James overtook me. I ended the week with only 192,296 steps, 70,629 behind K. James. He was now in the lead.

Here is a log of what I did, day-by-day (copied and pasted from an e-mail to Amanda Morley so I don't have to re-invent the wheel):

Monday: I walked to work, worked, and came home. I also walked around in the parking lot for a while to get some more steps. I also attempted to do some Dance Dance Revolution with the pedometer in the hopes of getting my step total up. This failed miserably. DDR results in a lower number of steps than walking, in most cases, and although it isn't that expensive, walking is free, so... I may have also, at some point, done laps around town and inside the Max Value supermarket, Geo Amusement Developer, Apita Mall, and various other indoor establishments because it is so cold outside.

Tuesday: I walked to work, worked, and came home. I also walked around in the parking lot for a while to get some more steps. I may have also, at some point, done laps around town and inside the Max Value supermarket, Geo Amusement Developer, Apita Mall, and various other indoor establishments because it is so cold outside.

Wednesday: I walked to work, worked, and came home. I also walked around in the parking lot for a while to get some more steps. I may have also, at some point, done laps around town and inside the Max Value supermarket, Geo Amusement Developer, Apita Mall, and various other indoor establishments because it is so cold outside.

Thursday: I walked to work, worked, and came home. I also walked around in the parking lot for a while to get some more steps. I may have also, at some point, done laps around town and inside the Max Value supermarket, Geo Amusement Developer, Apita Mall, and various other indoor establishments because it is so cold outside.

Friday: I walked to work, worked, and came home. I also walked around in the parking lot for a while to get some more steps. I may have also, at some point, done laps around town and inside the Max Value supermarket, Geo Amusement Developer, Apita Mall, and various other indoor establishments because it is so cold outside.

Saturday: I walked to work (no, this isn't a mistake, I really did have to work on Saturday, hooray Japan), worked, and came home. I also walked around in the parking lot for a while to get some more steps. I was able to manage over 32K steps because this workday was slightly shorter than my regular workday. I may have also, at some point, done laps around town and inside the Max Value supermarket, Geo Amusement Developer, Apita Mall, and various other indoor establishments because it is so cold outside.

Sunday: Here we get into some analytics. In addition to walking/jogging all around town pretty much all day long, I headed over to the Peare Gym to do some treadmill time. My idea was that with a treadmill, I would be forced to stay at a high speed and therefore get a higher step count per hour. I also figured the rubber treadmill belt would be better on my ankles than the asphalt on which I normally run.

So I set the machine on 6 km/h and walked at a brisk pace for an hour: 5,830 steps during that hour. Gee, that seems a bit low...

So I set the machine to 9 km/h and jogged for an hour -- WHAT THE HECK, ONLY 6,247 STEPS? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THAT'S LESS THAN SIX PERCENT MORE THAN MY STEP TOTAL AT 6 KM/H!!!

It was then that I realized that I had a problem -- my pedometer was barely counting any additional steps per hour when I ran. So I went to the Sports Authority (yes, they have them in Japan) and inquired. They said that my Nintendo 3DS pedometer is only intended for walking. I tested out a 2,980 yen single-function pedometer and literally ran around the store for ten minutes while they timed me. My step total for that ten minutes was somewhere around 1,800 steps (much higher than the 1K steps my Nintendo 3DS probably would have given me for the same run).

This is a photo (my apologies for it being so shaky) of the treadmill at Peare Gym on which I realized that my Nintendo 3DS was poor at counting steps at high speeds. I did a one-hour time trial at 6 km/h and then another one-hour time trial at 9 km/h, and the step totals for each hour were nearly the same (i.e. at higher speeds, it was drastically under-counting my steps). I ended up buying a single-function Yamasa pedometer equipped for jogging to get around this problem, and used that pedometer through Weeks 3 and 4.

This is Kintetsu Yokkaichi Station. I ran to there (and near there) quite a bit during the Pedometer Challenge, including Week 2. Kintetsu Yokkaichi is a major train station in Mie Prefecture that has trains that go to Nagoya, Tsu, Yunoyama Onsen, etc.

At the end of Week 2, I had decided to start waking up earlier and doing mass numbers of steps before work, not just after work. That, combined with my new pedometer which would count more steps on jogging runs, might be enough to better compete with K. James and B. Hemby. There might be hope.

Pedometer Screenshots for the Second Week (proving my steps)