Breaking Up With My FitBit

My Only Half Marathon

Towards the end of 2017, a friend asked me if I would be willing to commit to running 1000 miles in 2018 as a motivator for her training for some half marathons.  She's a good friend... like really good... like one of my favorite people on the planet... but that was an easy question. Heck no!

I'm not a runner.  In fact I think I hate running.  I can run. As in, if a bear was chasing me or I happen to be facing oncoming traffic, I could get out of the way at a faster pace than my usual walk.  I have run road races in the past - including running our first half marathon together.  There's a chance I'll run a 5K again... those are fun.  But after we ran the half marathon, she just continued running them.  She's probably past 30 half marathons by now.  I didn't run another... and I can't imagine I would.

There are so many ways to exercise that it's not a big deal that running isn't on my list of choices.  Occasionally at the gym I choose the treadmill and get in an interval training session instead of a bike or elliptical, but in general I choose lifting weights and a class whenever possible.  I think the only time I really choose to run is when the weather is nice and I can be outside or I'm exploring a new place.

So I agreed to completing 1000 miles on foot with the goal being to walk that many miles in a year... and she would run them.  I got a FitBit that I wore pretty much every day for 2018 to track my progress and it was really fun.  The FitBit app lets you cheer others on and does some fun things when you meet your daily goals.  I completed 1000 miles towards the end of September and felt like wearing the FitBit tracker definitely motivated me to go a little bit further.  If I was wrapping up my day and it said anything over 9,000 steps, I almost always found a way to wander the house to hit that 10,000 step milestone.  I jogged in place reading a book that was resting on top of the laundry machine or paced the hallway back and forth listening to a Podcast just to finish that last 1,000.

There were certainly a few days where I did next to nothing... but overwhelmingly it increased my motivation to move.  When I looked back, there were only 5 days in 2018 where I walked less than 1 mile.   There were also a few days when I walked more than 10 miles in a day hiking.  So those are balanced out, right?  I started walking on my lunch hour a few times per week and when my job relocated to a much larger building, my step count increased just by having the bathroom and lunch room considerably farther away.  I really liked seeing how the tracker affected me and how the job change affected my movement.

But now it's 2019, and the FitBit is no longer on my wrist.  There's two reasons for this change.

First - I've decided it's time for my body to tell me when it wants to move... not a machine.  Some days after work I'm just downright tired and don't want to go to the gym.  I'm tired of making myself feel guilty for taking a day - or even a few days in a row - off from exercising.  I think I may have been torturing myself a little last year to make myself move more than felt good for me.  And... when you're on the stair climber or the elliptical at the gym, if you don't move your arms enough, the Fitbit didn't register it so it's like you didn't work out, and then a stupid machine was making me feel bad.  I'm not into that.  Funny enough, if I type aggressively enough during the work day, the FitBit also recorded key strokes as movement...and that's just ridiculous.  Sometimes I just type with purpose!

"A Beautiful Mind"

Second - I tracked everything I did last year.  Every mile I walked.  The food I was eating.  Workout days, stairs trained, progress towards personal goals, even the books I read. There's a beautiful thing about tracking in that it shows a lot of accomplishment and completion of tasks.  There's also the opposite effect - I was intimately aware of all my failures.  I set some goals that were not reasonable and every time I noticed how far I was from achieving them, I felt bad.  My 2018 planner looks like John Nash's office in "A Beautiful Mind."  Circles and lines and random numbers with symbols for workouts everywhere.  The tracking needs to go.

So... if I go for a long hike with my friends this year, I'll probably grab the FitBit to see what the daily mileage looked like.  If I can find it and was prepared enough to charge it. But it'll be because I'm choosing to move and curious to know how much.  If I need a day on the couch... which doesn't happen that often... I'm going to embrace it instead of feeling bad about it.  And maybe the sun will come back out in Seattle, and I'll chose to go for a run.  Or go kayaking... because I love that far more.

As always... if you have a FitBit or other kind of tracker... you should use it how you like.  You do you.  I'll do me.