About This Site

No team, no office, no company behind the name. Just one person who got annoyed at a bad number and decided to fix it.

This started with a physical therapist's instructions after a knee injury a few years back: walk 4,000 steps a day, no running, no skipping days, and track the distance so we could see the trend at the next appointment. Simple enough, except every app and every calculator I opened gave me a different number for the same walk. One assumed 2,000 steps to the mile, flat, no questions asked. Another asked for my stride length, which I had no idea how to measure without looking ridiculous pacing out my hallway with a tape measure.

I'm well over six feet tall. A flat 2,000-steps-per-mile average was built for someone shorter, and it was quietly overstating how far I'd actually walked, which matters when a doctor is reading your numbers and deciding whether you're recovering on schedule. So one evening instead of icing my knee like I was supposed to, I opened a blank file and wrote the actual formula: stride length from height, distance from stride, calories from distance. It took maybe an hour. It was for me, exactly one user, running locally on my laptop.

I showed it to a friend who was training for her first 10K and wanted to know what her daily step count actually meant in miles. Then to my mother, who has a step goal from her own doctor and zero patience for apps that want an account before they'll do basic math. Both asked if they could just have a link instead of the spreadsheet. That's the honest origin of this site: not a business plan, a handful of people who wanted the same small tool I'd already built for myself.

So I turned it into a real website, still nights and weekends, still just me writing the code, checking the math, and fixing what breaks. Every conversion on here runs on the same formulas from that first evening: stride length from height and sex, standard MET tables for calories, plain arithmetic for the unit conversions. Nothing here calls out to an AI to generate an answer, and nothing is guessing. If the number seems oddly specific, it's because it's actually computed, not looked up from a rounded chart.

There's no account to make, no email to hand over, and no step history stored anywhere, what you type into a calculator stays in your browser and disappears when you close the tab. The site covers its own hosting through a small amount of advertising, the same way most free tools do. That's it, that's the whole business model: keep it useful, keep it free, keep the lights on.

If a number looks wrong, a page is broken, or there's a conversion you wish existed, I'd genuinely like to hear about it, it's a lot easier to fix something when someone tells me it's broken. Reach me at hello@steps2miles.org.