random thoughts – Day 1,491 – (Tuesday) – fitness tracking

The sign-up for the wellness plan spring steps challenge opened last week and of course I signed up, because I seem to like signing up for the step events and never reaching the goals. The only days I've come close to the pace were vacation days spent walking, quite literally, all day.

My latest accessory.

After the last challenge in the fall, my old fashioned, clip on a beltloop or put it in a pocket pedometer accidentally went through the washer and dryer. It was in a pocket. It was ruined. My results in the challenge weren’t that great, either, and I still can’t process how people can achieve 7,000 steps in a day unless they are in professions that require a lot of walking like restaurant or retail work or professional athlete.

Anyway, the challenge begins soon and I wanted a way to track my semiannual lack of progress and completion. The massive digital mall of Amazon presented an overwhelming array of pedometers, watches, and rings. The rings are fascinating to me, but my fingers swell at night so I can’t wear rings to bed and sleep tracking would be foregone taking it off. Bright side, I saved hundreds of dollars by not getting a ring.

The descriptions for watches weren’t completely helpful and it was hard to compare. General vague statements like “tracking for 20 activities” would be more helpful if it listed which activities. One watch with 13 activities had an icon that looked like a stick figure dancing, but the reviews on it weren’t great so I opted for a different one with 20 unspecified activities and hoped one would be dance. It had overnight shipping and would arrive in about 20 hours after being ordered, so why not. I may fly blind into a purchase, but I feel better if it comes quickly.

The magic watched delivered this morning and the battery was set to charge. The app was downloaded to my phone. The mechanics of operating the thing with minimal guidance were attempted. The quick start guide took four pages to say little more than “charge before use” and the rest is all user guess work. The misnamed product videos were of the ridiculous unboxing genre and essentially useless because already know how to open a box. What I wanted to know was how to count steps, get heartrate and oxygen readings, know the battery charge level, and see which 20 activities can be tracked.

Lessons have been learned on day one of the fitness watch. The 20 activities do not include dance, but do include something called “lazy car.” What the what? The walking mode seems to work like the Map My Walk app on my phone – meaning it tracks the distance by GPS. I've been down that road when I mowed the lawn a few years ago and the walking app on my phone logged no distance for the 40 minutes it took and the image of the route looked like a knotted mess of string.

Stats from a chunk
 of a mostly usual day.

According to the treadmill at the gym tonight, I walked 1.38 miles in 25 minutes, most of it at a 4 mile per hour pace, plus there was the normal workday minimal level of walking around. The watch logged about 700 steps at the gym, 1151 steps total for the day, and half a mile for the entire day. Not super helpful. 

I’m bummed about the absence of a dance mode, because we really don’t cover a lot of ground with our choreography either, which is created for some really small stages. Even the old pedometer only tracked forward and backward movement but not side-to-side and in circles which is the direction of a good amount of dance steps. But it buzzes (nags?) me when I've been sitting too long and also when I should drink water. 

Anyway. It will be fun to see how the fitness watch experiment goes. The actual step count accuracy seems iffy, and I haven’t set it up for weather or social media updates, but I like the heart rate monitoring and can’t wait for the sleep analysis. And it wasn't expensive, so there won't be a high level of wallet misery or buyer's remorse.