If you don't record it does it count?

You’ve heard it said our world is over connected.

Maybe not.

You can make friends in New Zealand, Spain, Japan and Colorado all by just posting about your hobby online. At the same time, you can easily lose the connection to your self, to your own body.

I’m not immune to this. I rely on my Garmin to tell me if I had a good nights sleep, track my pace and heart rate on runs, number of steps, etc. I even check it to verify if I’m stressed.

With fitness these devices do tremendous good but also create a weird psychological game. If you go out for a run and don’t record it, never post it to Strava, does it even count?

Are you still building fitness if you can’t calculate TSS exactly?
It’s hard to say.

Is your FTP growing if you didn’t record power on your last ride?
The world may never know. Literally.

The obvious truth is the body knows. The body is adapting the same whether we hit record or not. Every push up, every squat, every run, every swim, it all adds up.

There is another aspect. It’s the fitness version of “pics or it didn’t happen”.

I ran a local 5k recently. When I crossed the finish line, the time on the clock was 21:44 but my watch said I only ran 4.9km. I took off to round it out. Strava now says my best time is 10 seconds slower than the clock.

So, which time do I tell people when they ask? Is the race shorter than 5k or did my watch not measure it accurately?
I have no idea.

Should I sweat it over 10 seconds? Probably not. But I do.

I’m fascinated by the fact that these are questions I would have never asked before I had this watch strapped to my wrist.

Here’s the deal: Fitness wearable are tools. They are useful.
However, like every tool they change us as we use them. It’s important to recognize when tools are changing us in unhelpful ways.

If you worked hard, you worked hard. Forget about your pace. If you are feeling tired, you are tired regardless of what your device tells you.

Enjoy the process. Don’t work to make an emotionless machine happy.