Stingl: 80-year-old walker charts his progress on a globe, and he's on his 2nd time around

Tom Krueger doesn't need a Fitbit. He's got a globe. 

The retiree has walked its circumference once already, virtually speaking, and is nearly halfway around a second time.

Right now he's strolling across the Indian Ocean at a pace of 3 miles a day. So, yeah, it's going to take years to get from Africa to Australia.

Tom has 24 different routes he likes, many of them in his Brown Deer neighborhood. Some days he hits the track at nearby high schools. Sometimes he drives to another part of town for a walk there. If it's raining or lousy, he does laps indoors at the Y.

"I'm not a complete nut. If it's terrible weather or if I'm not feeling quite right, I will skip," he told me when I joined him the other day for a hot late-morning walk near his home.

He records every single mile in a school notebook, including the date and which route he covered. It goes back to 1981. So that's a little nutty.

"What's that called? Excessive compulsive? I could be that, too," he laughed.

But it wasn't until Tom retired from Milwaukee Public Schools in 1994 that he really got serious about walking the world. He started the job in 1959 and taught math the entire time at John Muir Middle School on the city's northwest side. So it's not surprising he's a numbers and graphs person.

Making his way east and south from Milwaukee, he divided the old Rand McNally globe into 25 segments, each 1,000 miles. A pin marks his approximate current location, though he doesn't bother to move it such a tiny amount every day.

"I went around the Earth in 2008. I hit the 25,000 mile mark in May 2008," he said.

As of June of this year ended, Tom had walked 36,096 miles since he began keeping track. His biggest year, when he was logging 5 miles a day, was 1,673 miles in 2000. Now, at 3 miles most days since he turned 80, he aims for 700 miles in a year.

Plenty of people walk farther than that, he said. Or bike or run. What sets him apart is the detailed log and the measured globe-trotting.

He just keeps at it, year after sweaty year, mainly because he knows it's good for him. 

"I've been blessed with very good health. I was born with one arm, but other than that I've been very healthy," he said. When students asked about his right arm ending at the elbow, he would often say, "I used to be a lion tamer."

Tom and his wife, Mary Jeanne, raised four children and have seven grandchildren. They have seen much of the world for real, including the pyramids of Egypt, Great Wall of China, Great Barrier Reef, Amazon River and all 50 United States.

Mary Jeanne tells Tom his pace is too fast for her, so he mostly walks alone.

"People have said when are you going to get to the moon? That's 250,000 miles," Tom said.

At 700 miles a year, that would take 357 years. So the moon is out. Tom also accepts that, unless he's alive and going strong at 100, he likely won't finish the final 14,000 miles back to the speck on the globe called Milwaukee.

But that's OK.

His day revolves around logging his 3 miles. 

And his doctor finishes Tom's annual physical with this advice: "Keep walking."

Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl