Educators to walk twice 'around the globe'

More than 500 staff and faculty members at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) walked a distance equivalent to more than twice the trek around the globe during AUS' recent Walk the Globe 2011 campaign. As part of an inaugural 12-week health campaign organised by the university's Wellness Centre, participants collectively walked 93,000 kilometres on the AUS campus in 123 million steps. The approximate distance around the globe is 40,000 kilometres or 52.8 million steps. "The goal of the participants was to walk 10,000 steps a day using a pedometer to count their progress," said Lee Mitchell, director of the Wellness Centre at AUS. "They were all handed a health booklet with lots of information and a record book to log their daily step count." He added it takes 10,000 steps a day to maintain a healthy exercise regime coupled with the right nutrition. A large poster of the globe was set up in the university's main building with a monthly update of the walkers' total progress around the globe. The AUS campus was divided into eight sections of the world starting from the UAE and heading east to Asia, Australia, Australasia, North America, South America, Greenland and Europe. "In the first phase we reached Rio De Janeiro," said Mitchell. "In the second phase we'd been round the globe once and reached the Hawaiian Islands." The distance and number of steps around the globe were calculated by staff in the AUS administration and Wellness Centre. Mitchell said calculations revealed the average person takes 1,320 steps in a kilometre as everyone walks differently, taking different strides. Mohammad Anees, the office boy for the administrative office at AUS, joined the walkathon to find out the exact number of steps he took every day as he travels across the administrative office. "On average I walked 31,000 steps a day," he said. They did it a step at a time. From / Gulf News