How To Walk 111,273 Steps In 24 Hours
The story of one of the most ridiculous things I did last year
This past summer, on July 22, from 12:00 AM to 11:59 PM, I walked 111,273 steps. This seems to consistently be something people think is an interesting story, so I decided to write about it here before I forget too many of the details. First, the obvious question:
Why would you do that?
I had the idea a couple weeks earlier. I watched a few YouTube videos of people trying to walk 100,000 steps in a day, which seems like a nice round number. Even better, it hits the sweet spot of being both a difficult thing to do, and still clearly achievable. Assuming somewhere around 6,000 steps per hour (a typical rate), 100,000 is close to 17 hours of walking. That’s a lot of walking, but very much not an impossible feat. The YouTube videos I saw seemed to have a roughly 50% success rate, and that’s including people who made clearly bad choices like doing it in 95 degree heat, or starting at 9 AM. They were on average more fit than me, and everyone agreed that it was very difficult, so it wasn’t all good news, but I started to think “Hey, maybe I could do this.”
I also thought that I might be pretty good at this. I was a cross-country runner in high school, so I figured I had some ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other despite feeling exhausted. I walk a decent amount, average somewhere around 12,000 steps per day, and had walked over 30,000 steps in a day a couple times without feeling that bad. Eventually, I decided that I would try to do it, and started to plan my attempt.
Initial Planning
I figured I would need some motivation, so I started to make some bets with people about how many steps I could get to. People were pretty happy to bet that I would get under 60 or 65,000 steps. I was pretty confident that I could at least beat that: 10 hours of walking in a 24-hour period seemed very doable. These bets were mostly not just “$10 if you get above 60,000,” but instead structured as “I earn $1 for every 1,000 steps I get above 60,000, and lose $1 for every 1,000 steps I get below 60,000.” This ensured that I would remain as motivated as possible even after reaching 60,000.
Additionally, I realized that I wouldn’t need too much motivation at the early parts of the walk. So I made some other bets as options, where, for example, I could pay $3 to own an option, and:
if I didn’t reach 80,000 steps, I would get paid $0 in return
if I did reach 80,000 steps, I would get paid $1 for every additional 1,000 steps above 80,000.
These sorts of bets meant two things: firstly, if I reached 80,000 steps, suddenly every step I took would be worth more. And also, they had limited downside— in the example above, my maximum possible loss was $3. At this point I had made many bets with many different people, and so I was pretty invested in myself and didn’t want to make more bets with large potential downsides. Options provided a good solution to this.
With my motivation secured, I started planning out exactly how I would go about the walk. Luckily, I was located near the bottom of Manhattan, which gave me a lot of very flat area to work with. My plan was to walk up and down the length of Manhattan, which would give me around 30 or so miles, and then go from there. I didn’t want to have too much uphill or downhill - downhill might make me faster, but the goal wasn’t speed here.
Nutrition was another important aspect. I did some research on ultramarathon fueling, because I didn’t want to be too tired to walk, or suddenly collapse. The recommendation was to have around 240-360 calories of food each hour, as well as 20 oz of liquid per hour. I planned to satisfy this by buying a bunch of Clif bars (a food I already knew I could tolerate), as well as Gatorade for the liquid. I would eat one Clif bar (260 calories) and drink one Gatorade (20 oz) per hour, and this would satisfy my nutritional needs. I also planned to have some high-carb meals later in the day.
Then, there was the question of sleep. Obviously, I would need to wake up very early in the morning to take maximum advantage of the day. But I wasn’t going to be able to start sleeping until 8 PM - so how much sleep was the right amount to get? Every minute of sleep was important, but every minute of the 24 hours was also important. And should I take a nap during the day to refresh myself? I decided to try to wake up at 1 AM, to get 5 hours of sleep and only waste one hour of the day. The naps would be a game-time decision depending on how tired I felt during the day.
So here’s what happened:
July 22, 2023, 1:00 AM, 0 steps
I woke up as planned at 1:00 AM, packed my backpack with Clif bars and Gatorade, put on my fully charged Apple Watch, and set off to walk along the Hudson River trail. The first few hours were fairly uneventful - I drank my Gatorade, ate my Clif bars, and clicked off about 6,200 steps per hour. Around 4, I realized that I was getting pretty far north, and didn’t really want to be in any of the higher-crime areas of Manhattan at 4 AM, so I turned back and walked the other way until the sun rose. Along this route happened to be a few vending machines which dispensed some Powerade, which was great, because it meant I didn’t have to go find a 24-hour store.
From 5 to 9 AM, I felt great. The sun rose on a beautiful morning, and I was still on the same pace without feeling too tired. Around the time I passed 40,000 steps, more steps than I had ever recorded walking in a day before, I realized that things were going better than I had expected - it was still the early morning, and I had already gotten nearly halfway to 100,000. This point was when I felt the best of the whole walk. I hadn’t expected to be able to walk for 7 hours without much break, and I realized that I was going to make it a lot farther than I expected.
I reached the top of Manhattan at around 8:30, and then half an hour later passed 50,000 steps at 9:03 AM. I still hadn’t stopped for more than a minute or two, and was beginning to wonder if the upper limits of the range I considered possible could actually happen. If I kept up this pace, I would reach around 140,000 steps. (spoiler: I did not). I was definitely starting to feel more tired, and the Gatorade and Clif bars were getting harder to eat, but nothing felt especially bad.
11:00 AM, 62,035 steps
Two hours later, things started to take a turn. I went into a Target to buy some more Gatorade, and my feet started to hurt more. I got my first of several blisters, which in retrospect I probably could have avoided by bringing a change of socks or putting tape on my feet or something. Blisters are painful! I was also starting to get a little lightheaded, so I decided to take a break. Initially I went into a Starbucks, which didn’t have any seats, so I sat on a table at the back until one of the employees told me to get off of the table. I felt this was a little unfair, considering that I was very tired, but eventually my instinct to avoid any and all public confrontation won out and I went to another restaurant. (New York is a great city in lots of ways, but it has a significant lack of free places to sit.)
My plan was to eat a meal around this time, but having eaten a LOT of Clif bars, I was not feeling very hungry for “real” food. So after a half-hour break, it was around noon, and I started walking back to my apartment at the very bottom tip of Manhattan. I was at 64,000 steps, and roughly 10 miles away from the apartment, so I knew it would take a few hours. It was starting to warm up - I hadn’t chosen a 95 degree day, but the high temperature was about 84. I decided to walk through Central Park, which would provide some shade.
Not much happened for the next couple hours. I started taking more frequent, short breaks, knowing that I had to pace myself to avoid completely hitting the wall. By 3:00, I had hit 80,000 steps, and secured a profit on nearly every bet I had made. My blisters continued to make the walk painful, and I was looking forward to coming home and taking a nice long break.
One interesting thing that had started to happen was that before the day started, I had created a chat to inform people of my progress, and people in that chat had began betting on it amongst themselves. I gave updates every hour, ensuring that a steady stream of information would come into the chat. People made simple bets ($10 that I would reach at least 105,000) and complicated bets ($10 in exchange for a contract that would pay out abs(100 - x) dollars, where x was my steps divided by 1000).
4:15 PM, 86,000 steps
At this point I took a nice, long break, which meant “lying on my bed for 45 minutes hoping that my legs would regain some strength.” I also popped my blisters, which didn’t actually help the pain, but did make it so I could fit my feet back into my shoes. I briefly considered switching to sandals, but after walking with sandals for five minutes they ended up being more annoying than normal shoes, so I ended up deciding to keep the shoes. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel like sleeping. I had assumed I would need some caffeine or something, but it seems like walking for the whole day had the same effect (life hack!).
I was very confident I was going to make it to 100k at least. I was on pace for 125k, but that would have required me to keep up my average pace, which I definitely was not going to do. To reach 100k, though, I needed to walk something like one mile per hour for the rest of the time- assuming I didn’t break my leg, it would be pretty achievable. I set my goal at 110k, which I thought was a nice number in between the two. Now fully rested, or at least as close to that as I could get, I started off again.
The next three hours were pretty boring, to be honest. I walked mostly around Battery Park, the park at the south end of Manhattan that my apartment was very close to. I found a loop that was about 500 steps, and would try to do a whole loop without checking my watch. Every loop, I would allot myself two minutes of time sitting on a bench. It became a routine - walk a loop, sit down, get up, walk a loop. At one point I started to get hungry, so I bought some overpriced watermelon from a street vendor. Eventually I started building in some longer rests - every hour or so, I would get to head back to my apartment for a 10-15 minute rest.
8:00 PM, 98,161 steps
If you’ve ever played a video game where you can only sprint for a certain amount of time before the stamina bar fills up, I felt a lot like that. The first few steps after a rest were easy, but after a couple minutes, it would get a lot harder, and I would feel the urge to sit back down and replenish my energy for the next burst. At around 8:30 PM, I reached six digits - 100,000 steps. I felt accomplished. But I knew I couldn’t stop there, not when the day hadn’t ended yet. The sun was going down, and walking on the hard concrete was starting to irritate my blisters more and more. I decided to move to the final stage of my walk - the carpeted hallway on my floor of the apartment complex.
Really, I just wanted it to end by this point. I didn’t feel triumphant, or excited. There was no more scenery, no more food. No more betting in the chat. The only thing I could think about was the time remaining. 2 hours, 45 minutes. 2 hours, 44 minutes. A loop of the 11th floor was about 100 steps. Ten loops would be 1,000 steps. The bland colors of the walls were all the same, and the only thing that changed was the numbers. 104,300. 104,400. Oh, it’s 10:00, need to post the hourly update. 5 more laps. Then a rest. Then another 5 laps.
I started to feel a little isolated. What was I even doing this for? People were off at their dinner plans, or heading to a bar, or just getting dessert with friends, and I was walking in circles on my floor for 3 hours. Lots of people had walked with me for parts of my walk, and people had been texting me all day. But it felt very much like they were on the outside looking in, which was maybe unavoidable - no one else had been doing the same thing as me, after all. Maybe it was the repetition, or the boredom, or the FOMO (this was a Saturday night, after all), but in a way it hadn’t felt before, the last few hours of the walk felt kind of lonely.
At 11:52 PM, I reached 111,237 steps. I walked the final steps to my bed, and collapsed on top. Technically, there were 8 minutes remaining. I probably could have eked out a few more steps, but having no way to reach the next thousand, I decided to stop there, having reached 111,111. I took pictures of my watch to record it, and just like that, it was over.
11:59 PM, 111,237 steps
July 23, 2023
The next day was spent almost entirely in my bed. I walked around a little, on the advice of a random Reddit post which recommended exercising the muscles a little bit the day after an ultramarathon. My legs held up pretty well the next week, with the blisters really being the only major issue. Even those healed after about a week, and I walked 20,000 steps with no problem the following Saturday. People congratulated me, paid out their bets, etc. over the few days following. Life went back to normal.
To be honest, this was one of my favorite things I did in 2023. It feels good to set a goal, put a lot of effort into achieving the goal, and to be successful, even when the goal isn’t a typical one. I don’t think I push myself out of my comfort zone as often as I should. I don’t know what zone walking 56 miles in a day was in, but I don’t think you could put it into the category of “comfort”.
The most common question that people ask me, having heard that I did this once, is if I would do it again. For now I think the answer is no. I’m glad I did this, but a lot of the benefits of having done it came from the fact that I hadn’t done it before. It’s a fun story, but “I walked 110,000 steps in a day AGAIN” is not quite as interesting as doing it for the first time. And I don’t think I could get quite as many people willing to bet that I would get less than 60k.
In the end, though, it didn’t matter whether I walked 110,000 steps or 11,000 steps. It didn’t matter that I had dedicated the entirety of a day to walking, or that possibly, I had walked more steps on that day than anyone else in America1. In the eyes of the Apple Health app— it was never going to be enough.
I didn’t find any ultramarathons going on that day, and most of the Strava distance leaders for the month of July didn’t go more than 30 or so miles on July 22 in particular. So I think it’s possible.
how many miles did this end up being
Goated