“What I do usually equates to maybe 35,000 steps a day,” Syracuse says. It’s rare he misses his daily goal of walking five hours. His Fitbit tracks his steps, but he’s meticulous about recording the minutes and hours he’s accumulated walking. He says he gets in some steps during lunch, when he gets home from work and again after dinner. to squeeze in an hour walk around campus before his workday begins. A UB employee for more than two decades, Syracuse tries to arrive at his office in Park Hall by 7 a.m. Syracuse, of the Town of Lockport, says he’s on the treadmill until about 5 a.m., when he gets ready for the day, then hops back on again for a half hour before leaving for work.

While he walks, he catches up on emails or watches NetFlix or does some banking or shops online or gets a jump on his workday.

He laces up his Nike extra wides, sets the treadmill for a brisk but conversational pace and arranges his iPad in front of him. an hour that requires him to get to bed around 8:30 the night before. Syracuse, an early riser all his life, says it’s not unusual for him to be up and on his basement treadmill by 2:30 a.m. Syracuse, 60, was in his early 50s when he started walking an hour a day, after years of running had taken a toll on his body.īut he wanted to see more health benefits from his walking, and after receiving some undesirable numbers from his doctor, Syracuse started increasing his steps.Īmid the COVID-19 pandemic, he settled into a routine. “I wasn’t even going to do it, but I decided at the last minute, ‘What the heck? I have to walk anyway, so why not?’” Syracuse says. For the second straight year, Syracuse was the top stepper in the challenge, recording 1,678,375 steps during the month of April. “Nobody believes me,” Syracuse says with a shrug.īut they might if they took part in last month’s eighth annual Step Challenge, sponsored by the School of Public Health and Health Professions. It’s like walking from the North Campus to Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, which is why he understands if people might be a little skeptical. That’s as many as 50,000 steps, or the equivalent of 20-plus miles.

Over the course of a day, Syracuse, a senior academic adviser in the College of Arts and Sciences, says he walks a minimum of five hours - sometimes six, even seven. Long before the sun is up, while still in the wee hours of the morning, Joe Syracuse is already out of bed and on his treadmill.

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