The first thing I do every morning is check my watch, not the time, but my sleep score.
As a runner, when the bright red letters say my score (and training readiness) is low, I feel instant fear. Anyway, I keep moving forward, inspecting my heart rate variability and my stress level, snapshots that influence the tone I carry during the day.
What does fear of my smartwatch's interpretation of my athletic competition say about me? That I have become a pawn in the gamification of health data.
Last year, electronics accounted for one of the largest proportions of total Black Friday sales. according to Deloitte. That's when I bought my first smartwatch, a Garmin.
This year I'm going to throw it away.
I was the perfect target. For several years I had been preparing to run my first marathon. I've watched fitness influencers, ultramarathoners, and Olympic athletes optimize their training with meticulous tracking and high-tech devices. I wanted to participate. I bought the watch and joined Strava, a social network for athletes.
Once I had a tracker on, sleep became sacred. I traded in the evening socializing for it, trusting that I would get something out of it on race day. I built my days around my nights, paralyzed by a false sense of control over my circadian rhythm.
Sleep, like my running routine, had slowly transformed from a bodily function to a technological display of productivity.
I was hooked and emboldened by the illusion that I was training intuitively. I tried really hard when my Garmin pushed me, and even harder when I wanted to prove their metrics wrong. I started running more to get the PR (personal record) badge and “your fastest 5K!” notifications that for mental clarity and loneliness.
I ran because I loved it and, because I loved it, I fell prey to its stravification. Suddenly, I was no longer running on my own. I applied for public consumption.
I realized this only when it literally became painfully obvious. An MRI discovered that the persistent pain I had been ignoring in my heels (something my watch had missed) was caused by four running-induced stress fractures.
Recovering from the injury forced me to be sedentary and during that time I thought a lot about applying exercise culture.
I've found that health optimization tools (those marketed as necessary for better sleep, lower resting heart rate, higher VO2 max (a measure of how much oxygen the body absorbs) ), etc.) are designed to capitalize on our fitness anxiety. . We track ourselves back and forth, obsessing over our flaws to no apparent end. In doing so, we are deprogrammed from listening to innate physiological signals and reprogrammed to create shadow experiences, such as posting our detailed training statistics or running routes on digital walls that no one is looking at.
I also learned that if you stop tracking, you will feel marginally but noticeably better.
I don't deny that today's fitness devices are incredibly attractive and, in many ways, tracking can be useful for training. However, I am convinced that overreliance on the data collected by devices and apps (and the comparisons we make when sharing it) can quickly corrupt and commodify what I consider the true essence of running: being present.
When we don't track, when we just track, we can begin to reap the boring but profound psychological benefits of endurance sports (the repetitive silence, the constant failure) that can't be captured in a post or monetized.
And when we endure the mundane and difficult aspects of a sport, over and over again, we often make both conscious and physical gains, becoming more aware of how and what we pay attention to. This is no small task. It takes discipline to remain aware, present, and undistracted.
Exercise is a unique opportunity to allow the movement of our body to color our thoughts from one minute to the next. When we're on the go, we don't need to analyze our health metrics. We can learn to accept the moment and be humbled by our limitations.
The season of gift giving will try to convince you that you need devices to make your exercise more effective and efficient. There will be bright and beautiful advertisements with famous athletes. There will be a fancier smartwatch and a next-generation GPS tracking shoe sole like the one Instagram keeps showing you. Be skeptical.
Breaking free, even temporarily, from the smartwatch or smartphone or fill-in-the-blank smart device that tracks your every move is a challenge worth taking on. Because every walk, run or bike ride is a new story, and without fitness devices, the path is still ours.
Cate Twining-Ward is a climate policy consultant in New York City.
