Yesterday, wanting to get a jump on my steps for the day and knowing I’d be busy later, I set my elliptical trainer for a full hour’s workout, instead of my usual 45 minutes.

I also decided I’d try to push the speed, and see how many calories I could burn (the machine calculates that based on, I guess, my weight, time, speed and resistance level). Usually I stay around 60 rpm and tend to get about 10 Calories per minute. The one time I’d ever done 60 minutes at once before (the previous weekend), for instance, I’d burned 609.

But on Saturday, I’d done more than 500 in 45 minutes, and I was curious whether I could maintain that pace for an hour.

I did so without ever breathing hard — although there was a lot of sweat. I also did it with a relatively slow average heart rate — 119 bpm. (Which sort of surprised me. I had looked down in the last few minutes of the workout, and it was at 135.)

The result? 671 calories.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I didn’t get to do a second workout, so my total for the day was only 11,460 steps. Before that, I’d done more than 15,000 each of the three days in February.

I’m going to try to top 15k again today. We’ll see…