 |
"Sure am glad I walked the stairs.
Now I can enjoy a tablespoon of soy sauce." |
Gadgets and data often motivate me to workout. Suffering up
Little Cottonwood is a little more tolerable when my toys tell me that I should
rejoice at a grade under double digits and I burned more calories than the
entire Cheesecake Factory menu. I track my miles on my Garmin, sync the data to
my phone and view my activity history online... it's a database geeks wet dream.
I live at a time when I can tell exactly what temperature it was when I reached
the top of Emigration Saturday. My first bike computer, a hot pink Avocet
bought in 1992, told me speed, max speed, distance and hours. Even with the
sparse amount of data on that two button device, I was still so enamored with
it that I hit the back of a parked car on my first ride using it.
Activity data may not be necessary to enjoy cycling, or
skiing for that matter, but it is part of my routine. There is another piece of
data gathering technology, however, that I have to say goodbye to, for my own
sanity. MyFitnessPal is a great app that is used to track caloric intake. The
database in terms of foods is extensive and that they have with a pretty robust
feature set for a free version of the app, but I feel like the time has come to
uninstall. When I discovered it a few years ago, it seemed like a great way for
me to keep my calories inline. Then I discovered I could sync it with my Garmin
Connect data and it was even better. Nothing looks as good as finishing a
killer ride up Little and realizing you have like 4,000 calories you can blow
on beer and chicken wings.
Alas, like all powerful tools of analysis, MyFitnessPal,
for all its good, drained the pleasure from something I've loved ever since my
mom first drenched broccoli in Velveeta-- eating. Instead of savoring my lunch
while reading the latest issue of Backcountry Magazine, I logged my meal. And
god help me if I went out to eat and couldn't find an accurate equivalent to my
meal. What exactly should I enter for that Lonestar Taqueria fish burrito? At
moments like that, I felt like not
knowing the calories was probably better than knowing.
I've always been skeptical
of the fad diets, the fad workouts, the fad weight-loss programs, but as I
reached middle age and transitioned to a job where I sit at a desk all day, I
swallowed fad
gadgets-- smartphone apps,
Vivofit and all. How we stay healthy is as unique to our bodies as what
beer we like or our religion. It's great that there are people and widgets out
there to help us achieve our goals, but I need to return to a Zen approach to
getting into shape. I need to look for answers inside, not outside. For someone
who catalogs and documents everything from baseball cards to concert setlists
to camping supplies, the last thing I needed was a database of my caloric
consumption for the final 40 years of my life. I'm going to try and avoid
getting romantic about our "big data" world, but I love how
somewhere in the Nevada desert is a server that could tell me how many Dove
bars were consumed by left-handed women aged 25-34 and weighing less than
150lbs. Forget the landfills, we've got a pile of 1s and 0s that documents
every aspect of our lives. What an age. Now excuse me while I add to my 1s and
0s with the exact time it takes me to climb Clark's at Corner Canyon after 5pm
in my middle ring while wearing baggy shorts and socks with some sort of beer
logo.
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