When I began trying to get fit I knew that I would need something to gauge my level of health. This was around 4 years ago and the last time I had been in a gym or run a lap was over a decade earlier. So I was starting from scratch and hadn’t a clue about anything, not even about how unhealthy I was.
After reading some books and websites, and then consulting a trainer I decided that walking and running would be where I would start my fitness crusade. The general consensus was that in order to start getting healthy that I would need to walk at least 10,000 steps per day. So I would need a pedometer, a little device to count my steps.
Most pedometers I’d seen were in the 40 to 100 dollar range. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make that much of an investment in something I might drop a week later. Remember, this is at the beginning of the process and I was not all that sure of things at the time.
I was in a dollar store picking up some cheap batteries and next to the batteries was a pedometer. A little cheap plastic device with a digital counter and a start and stop button and nothing else. This was the most primitive type of pedometer, a pendulum pedometer. Basically anytime you shake it back and forth you cause it to tick off one more step. You could vigorously shake it in your hand for a minute and tick off a couple hundred “steps”. The price was right and for my purpose it was perfect.
The next day I clipped it on and went through my normal day and lo and behold I barely took a thousand steps in a day. Depressing but eye-opening. I took the pedometer for a few test walks and found what it took to get to 10,000 steps and did it. After that I got a better sense of things and stopped using it.
A year or so later I stepped up the game and bought a pedometer watch. It was much more accurate than the previous pedometer and could calculate distances and give me miles per hour for when I did run. But I never really took to it. After a couple of months I stopped using it.
My next couple of years were about building up my fitness habits. I wasn’t really looking into better performance but just building up the routine to make it habitual within myself.
But in 2013 I got a new smartphone that had a built-in fitness app. This app used the phone’s built-in GPS application to plot my running routes and give me the amount of time I spent running and the distance covered. This was quite handy as I could strap it onto my arm and not even have to set it up. Just go and run and let the app do its thing.
I used it for over a year and watched my daily distance run over time grow and grow. If I missed a day the app would show that on a bar graph and tell me how my average compared to previous months. A handy motivational tool.
Then one day someone at the developer decided to update the app and erased all my records for the last 15 months. In the blink of an eye all that hard work was gone.
Stunned doesn’t cover it. Angry? yes, a bit. The new app works but I now have to log in before each exercise. Not as automatic as I’d been used to before. On top of this I now have to store my results on a cloud based app where it’s vulnerable to hacking. I know, not a huge deal but still, why couldn’t it be stored on my phone. Not the same easy experience that I was used to.
Along with this development I had been in a bit of a funk about my running lately. I’d been missing days and doing less and this whole app mess didn’t help things.
I went on vacation and realized how much more I needed to do. The vacation allowed me to set my goals for the coming year and one thing I realized is that the fitness doesn’t depend on the technology to work. All the apps, and the watches, and the fitness bands are great but at the end of the day they don’t do the work for you, you do.
So the day after I came back I went out and just ran my regular route without the phone. I’ve been running every day since that without needing to be prodded. My fitness goals have been set and I’ve already contacted my new trainer to begin working out in the new year.
The technology was a good way to get back to where I needed to be in my life but it’s not the most crucial aspect of my fitness. The point of it all is to feel better and to become the person that I want to be and no device will do that for me.
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