David Sedaris got a Fitbit–a gizmo you wear on your wrist that tracks your physical activity–and soon he was obsessed. The device vibrates when you reach 10,000 steps in a day. For Sedaris, 10,000 steps worked out to be a little more than four miles, a distance, he says that he could cover without even trying over the course of an average day. Soon he was at 12,000 steps per day. Then 15,000. Eventually he was walking all over the English countryside collecting trash (“You can tell where my territory ends and the rest of England begins,” he writes; “It’s like going from the rose arbour in Sissinghurst to Fukushima after the tsunami”), covering 60,000 steps, or 25 miles, every day. “I look back on the days I averaged only thirty thousand steps,” he writes, “and think, Honestly, how lazy can you get?”
I’m not sure how serious Sedaris is being–I mean, 25 miles is a long walk, particularly if you are carrying a heavy plastic garbage bag along with you–but his piece in the current issue of The New Yorker is pretty funny, as Sedaris’s writing usually is.