Personal Trainer Walking Unofficial Blog

Okay, so here’s the main reason I finally had to drop everything and set up this blog. What happened to the numbers with the wi-fi rankings tonight?! I connected, and suddenly there are 55, 112 players using Personal Trainer Walking. The only reason that seems odd is becasue yesterday it was 8,112. It’s been slowly increasing the number of users who go online with the game in the 70 days I’ve had it. I think there was less than 1000 when I first started. So a sudden jump of 47,000 players in 24 hours seems strange!

But even weirder is the Steps to the Moon. We had been slowly making our way there, and yesterday there was maybe 22 million steps left? 18 million? I can’t remember exactly. And it usually increased by about 8 million steps accumulated worldwide a day. But suddenly tonight it said there was 33+ billion steps to be added!! So we went to the moon, quickly celebrated, and started on our way to Mars. How can that possibly have happened in 24 hours.

I was happy to see a little dog in the number 1 spot today though. Go little guy! Interestingly, the top 5 tonight were all new people I haven’t seen on there before. Way to go guys! The highest I’ve been is #2, and I used to be #4 a lot. Yesterday I was #6. However, today I was #25. I don’t know if it’s all of the 47,000 new faces or just part of a glitch.

Do you think that these ranking steps and steps to the moon are only based on users in North America, if we have the North American release? They do call it World Ranking, so I would think it’s everyone all over the world. Which is really cool.

This is my Personal Trainer Walking Mii. She is imported from my Wii, but it’s nice to be able to choose clothing different then the bell shaped red thing she has to wear in the Wii! PLus she gets arms in this game. She’s got the little backpack when you see her from the side. Although now that I see the still image, am I wearing sweatpants..

 This is funny, but I have to admit I kind of have made up names for the familiar faces I see consistently in the top 5.

Greenie -  is the woman with the black short hair and green t-shirt dress who I’m sure must be a mail delivery person because she was totalling 200,000+ steps a week there for ages. I haven’t see you this week Greenie!

Bearded Backpack Guy -  is the guy in black with a beard and backpack. I saw you yesterday after not seeing you around for awhile. Nice to see you again!

Balding Angry Man - is the guy in the blue shirt with a beard and reddish hair. I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re very happy, but the Mii eyebrows make your guy look like he’s really out to get someone! Hey, could be good motivation though.

Purple Sprite – is the petite woman with the grey hair and purple outfit. Keep up the good work! My Mii looks like I tower above some of the tiny ones, but I think it’s because I imported mine from the Wii.

So it’s cool to see familiar faces and I wonder what some of you guys do, like ride bikes to work, or deliver the mail, or just plain walk for the sake of walking like I do.

So, today is my 70th day as a user of Personal Trainer Walking. I bought it because I enjoy walking as my sole form of exercise, and while I don’t need extra motivation, I thought it’d be fun to see how many steps I go in a day, or in a week. I work from home (Canada) as a graphic designer, so I like to get out twice a day for a couple of power walks. For 12 years, I walked two really long meandering walks with my yellow lab each day, and unfortunately, he passed away last Fall. But one thing he got me into the habit of is walking, no matter what weather, no matter what else I could be doing. I’d feel super guilty without getting out for two walks a day. But now without a dog, I find I walk very fast (I don’t stop to sniff and pee on weeds!). So my walks are a bit shorter than they were with him, but balance out in exercise because I go faster. I will get another dog sometime, and when I do, he’s going to wear a second pedometer. How cool is it that they even made a setting for dogs!

So, I started out with the default 3000 step goal. It seems on average, I can go about 9,500 steps in one midday walk through my neighbourhood and down the trails of the park here and back. Sometimes it takes me about 70 minutes, and lately maybe 84 because I walk partway in the water on the shore of the lake because it’s been so hot here (39 Celsius).  In the evening I go again for about 64 minutes. By the end of the day when I connect the pedometer to the DS, I’ve gone anywhere from about 19,000 steps to 25,500.  The longer times are when I’ve also gone to town to do errands or had an extra walk for whatever reason. For awhile I let the program do a weekly increase of the step goal to 1000 more each time he asked, but I stopped at 8000. Would it keep asking to increase forever? So I thought, what if one day at Christmas people are over and I really don’t make it out for as long, and I don’t meet my normal quota. I couldn’t stand it if I hadn’t met the goal, so I left it as 8000 becasue I know I can do that on one walk.

Anyway, who cares about all of that. Well, I do, because even though I said I didn’t need the extra motivation, the extra motivation of Personal Trainer Walking is fun! That little pedometer is very well made, and seems so much more accurate than the silly one I had from a cereal box a few years ago. And who can’t like the anthropomorphic version of him on the screen once you connect. He told me tonight that he’s known me for 70 days, and enjoyed everyone of them. Aww. He’s less scary than the floaty head guy in Brain Age, lol. My favourite part is using the wi-fi connection to see how everyone is ranking on the world scale. Seeing everyone who’s in the top five for that day, happily marching along is cool. And seeing how far we’re along to the Moon is a neat idea too. I keep doing the Illuminate Electricity Generator,  but I lit up my Big City Lights ages ago and now it doesn’t seem to do anything differently. But I’ve made 70 of those Walk the World photos. Dare I say I’ve learned things too. I had no idea Mocha wasn’t really just the delicious chocolate-coffee like Tim Horton’s makes, but actually a type of coffee from Ethiopia.

I’ve been searching for a forum or blog for discussing the Nintendo DS title Personal Trainer Walking, and since I haven’t found one, I’m going to start one. I’ve been thinking about it for awhile, because I thought it might be fun to “meet” some of the  familiar Mii faces I see in the top 5 online walking stats.

So welcome to my unofficial Personal Trainer Walking blog!