A headline in yesterday’s Sunday Times asks ‘Do I really need to take 10,000 steps a day?’
Now, we know that journalists don’t usually write their own headlines, but surely somebody at the Times has heard of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines which states, ‘Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.’
In this case you might also answer, ‘No of course it doesn’t ya bloody fool. That whole 10,000 steps a day thing was a gimmick put out by Japanese pedometer company Tamasa Tokei Keiki trying to flog its wares around the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.’
To be fair the article does acknowledge this, while not quite accepting what any ‘fule kno’ that you should walk the way you want to walk and not let some silly bugger tell you you’re doing it all wrong.
The very best thing about the 1964 Olympics was that it gave rise to the 1966 movie Walk, Don’t Run, a rom-com avant la lettre, starring Cary Grant with a slightly torturous McGuffin about flat-sharing in Tokyo and featuring an American Olympian played by Jim Hutton, an actor I’ve never seen in any other movie although apparently he did a lot of work including The Green Berets) .
Because it’s a comedy they obviously couldn’t make the Jim Hutton character a serious athlete so they made him a contestant in the most absurd event they could think of – the 50 kilometre walk, which is a lot of steps.
Hilarity ensued.
In the interests of you history might like to know that the real 1964 Olympics 50 kilometer walk was won by Abdon Pamich of Italy who clocked in at 4 hours, 11 minutes, 12.4 seconds. This is him:
