Frequently asked questions

The walking is going pretty well. I am a little behind schedule, though I am catching up fast. I am hearing a lot of questions that I would like to answer here.

1. Are you going to walk every street or will you use your bike? I am going to walk each and every street. I will use my bike to avoid overlapping streets, to get out of my neighborhood and to avoid walking cul de sacs and turnarounds twice. It will take a number of years, so my goal this year is 100 miles or more.
   
2. Are you going to walk both sides of the street? No, once is enough. There are 600 miles of streets. I want to finish before my son graduates high school.
3. Will you repeat streets? I am trying to avoid overlapping on streets by walking the length of as many streets as possible. I record as few overlaps as possible.
   
4. Some streets are not very safe. Will you walk those streets? Grand Rapids is pretty safe. I will be smart about walking streets in the daylight and with a phone. I hope that some friends will join me. (Chris T. and Barry and Jon W. have offered. Thanks guys! Please let me know if you want to walk too!) I will only walk legal, non-private streets. No walking the S-curve unless they open it again for foot traffic.
5. Has anyone walked with you yet? My son and wife have walked with me. I walk too fast and too long for my son, so he usually joins me on his bike.
   
6. How are you tracking your progress? I am using a pedometer, a AAA map and a pencil, a calculation of 1980 steps to a mile and a spreadsheet to track and translate steps to miles. I am playing with Google Maps to track progress, though it is not really designed for this kind of mapping, and it does not appear to display all the paths on one page.
7. Is that pedometer really accurate? It really is. I went on a four mile walk the other day and the number of steps was right on. I did have a short reading the other day, so I generally check against a map. The readings are never too long, so everyone will get their money's worth.
   
8. Did you really see a guy on a bike get hit by a car? Yup. He was about 2 feet from me. He got up and walked away. Neither he nor the guy in the car were paying attention to where they were going.
9. Why are you doing this? MS attacks the central nervous systems, sometimes stops people from moving as they want, sometimes causes memory failures or blurry vision. The MS Society does a good job of helping people that need it. I can not raise money riding a bike, so I walk, or shave my head. People actually donate money to the MS Society because of these silly things I do. So I keep doing them.