Writing equals catharsis. Venting is a synonym of my reasoning for putting this post down today. I can't take being tracked anymore. A long time ago, I was sitting in the Coyote Grill in the now vanished, Mission Mall. At the bar enjoying a nice meal and possibly too many beverages when a middle aged woman asked me a question. She claimed to be working on her thesis about what it means to be American. This had to be around 2002, after the September 11th attacks. It took me about three seconds to answer, "the ability to be left alone" was my response. I'm so clever I thought. She acted as if some secret code had been broken to her enlightenment, I think she just wanted a threesome but I digress. At least once a month for the next twelve years, I have thought about my answer and it's getting more and more pertinent everyday.
I won a Fitbit Force at work for signing up for the Live Well program offered by one of our healthcare providers. The program itself is excellent and requires minimal effort to reap rewards. Having taken the plunge into the world of high deductible "preferred" care plans with a Health Savings Account the responsibility is mine to make sure I take care of myself and in doing so earn financial benefits for my family. Putting the onus on the consumer to better own and control their healthcare decisions is not something I take lightly but either is my health. Which leads me back to my fitness tracking breaking point.
This fancy little devise allows you to track all sort of things, steps, calories, miles, floors, active minutes, and even your soundness of sleep. The functionality is provided to set a myriad of goals, track them all via your smartphone and website. The website enables joining groups, taking challenges, and competing with other for the elusive top ranking. Winning is a priority of mine and competition is a driver in my life. It's also a forty-five pound plate on my back that is hard to shrug off. Having an addictive personality traits it's easy for me to sucked into wanting to check my stats, wonder where I am on the leaderboard, and put in a few more miles to make sure I'm near the top. These behaviors keep me in shape physically but not necessarily mentally.
Fitocracy is a social fitness website and app designed to harness the power of social gaming, our virtual sharing, status updates, challenges and gamification of fitness to turn us from weekend warriors into Ironmen. Actually, it's really just taking the medium of social networking and attempting to derive the benefits from fitness by fusing this activities. It's probably working; I have no numbers and remember this blog is all about me here people. For over a year, maybe even two, I religiously entered my daily workout, tracking miles, sets, reps, even things like yard work to get as many points as possible. Entering weekly and monthly challenges to pit my mileage against others in hopes of being in the top three or ten. The reward for all this logging was self satisfaction and smugness. There was no one in any of the groups I joined that I knew personally or had any type of reality based relationship with. It was solely competition for the soulless.
I stopped logging activities in the middle of January on Fitocracy. My brain no longer has the capacity to care about what people in the ether care about my fitness. Yesterday, after two weeks with my Fitbit strapped to my wrist, I gave it to my wife and am already feeling better for it.
I don't own a Garmin or GPS type running watch, I rarely wear a watch why I'm running. I like to use Runmeter because it sends out emails to my wife when I start and end my runs so she can make sure I'm not dead or lost. I do my best when no one is watching but the pressure is high and the need to perform comes from within. When my head is buried in my phone, staring at a watch, logging stats in a computer I lose that personal touch. Facebook and Twitter seem to keep me engaged and a big part of that is the people I am engaged with. My family, friends, co-workers, the common thread here is people who know me.
I'm a hypocrite who likes to be tracked when it makes me feel and involves little or not effort on my part. The internet of things and the idea that everything will be connected and networked and smart, possibly is pushing me into old man territory. At Dreamforce this year Marc Benioff, the non-software evangelist, gave a keynote in between strange role plays and Huey Lewis and the News. One of the things he mentioned was a wifi, GPS enabled toothbrush. It would track your brushing metrics and change the relationship between the dentist and patient. Rather than asking, "have you been brushing" he would ask for you to login to the Oral B High Tech Teeth Performance Lab (I'm making that name up) and it would sync your stats and fundamentally change this relationship. Really? Does having the ability to monitor, track, and provide feedback via technology fundamentally change the relationship I have with my dentist? Maybe it does and maybe I'm am setting myself up to be steamrolled by the total connectedness of life. Who knows what will happen but when I deleted my accounts the sense of relief I felt was powerful, maybe that because it helps me feel left alone.
I won a Fitbit Force at work for signing up for the Live Well program offered by one of our healthcare providers. The program itself is excellent and requires minimal effort to reap rewards. Having taken the plunge into the world of high deductible "preferred" care plans with a Health Savings Account the responsibility is mine to make sure I take care of myself and in doing so earn financial benefits for my family. Putting the onus on the consumer to better own and control their healthcare decisions is not something I take lightly but either is my health. Which leads me back to my fitness tracking breaking point.
This fancy little devise allows you to track all sort of things, steps, calories, miles, floors, active minutes, and even your soundness of sleep. The functionality is provided to set a myriad of goals, track them all via your smartphone and website. The website enables joining groups, taking challenges, and competing with other for the elusive top ranking. Winning is a priority of mine and competition is a driver in my life. It's also a forty-five pound plate on my back that is hard to shrug off. Having an addictive personality traits it's easy for me to sucked into wanting to check my stats, wonder where I am on the leaderboard, and put in a few more miles to make sure I'm near the top. These behaviors keep me in shape physically but not necessarily mentally.
Fitocracy is a social fitness website and app designed to harness the power of social gaming, our virtual sharing, status updates, challenges and gamification of fitness to turn us from weekend warriors into Ironmen. Actually, it's really just taking the medium of social networking and attempting to derive the benefits from fitness by fusing this activities. It's probably working; I have no numbers and remember this blog is all about me here people. For over a year, maybe even two, I religiously entered my daily workout, tracking miles, sets, reps, even things like yard work to get as many points as possible. Entering weekly and monthly challenges to pit my mileage against others in hopes of being in the top three or ten. The reward for all this logging was self satisfaction and smugness. There was no one in any of the groups I joined that I knew personally or had any type of reality based relationship with. It was solely competition for the soulless.
I stopped logging activities in the middle of January on Fitocracy. My brain no longer has the capacity to care about what people in the ether care about my fitness. Yesterday, after two weeks with my Fitbit strapped to my wrist, I gave it to my wife and am already feeling better for it.
I don't own a Garmin or GPS type running watch, I rarely wear a watch why I'm running. I like to use Runmeter because it sends out emails to my wife when I start and end my runs so she can make sure I'm not dead or lost. I do my best when no one is watching but the pressure is high and the need to perform comes from within. When my head is buried in my phone, staring at a watch, logging stats in a computer I lose that personal touch. Facebook and Twitter seem to keep me engaged and a big part of that is the people I am engaged with. My family, friends, co-workers, the common thread here is people who know me.
I'm a hypocrite who likes to be tracked when it makes me feel and involves little or not effort on my part. The internet of things and the idea that everything will be connected and networked and smart, possibly is pushing me into old man territory. At Dreamforce this year Marc Benioff, the non-software evangelist, gave a keynote in between strange role plays and Huey Lewis and the News. One of the things he mentioned was a wifi, GPS enabled toothbrush. It would track your brushing metrics and change the relationship between the dentist and patient. Rather than asking, "have you been brushing" he would ask for you to login to the Oral B High Tech Teeth Performance Lab (I'm making that name up) and it would sync your stats and fundamentally change this relationship. Really? Does having the ability to monitor, track, and provide feedback via technology fundamentally change the relationship I have with my dentist? Maybe it does and maybe I'm am setting myself up to be steamrolled by the total connectedness of life. Who knows what will happen but when I deleted my accounts the sense of relief I felt was powerful, maybe that because it helps me feel left alone.
2 comments:
This caught my eye since my company just started offering fitbits. But I have no friends since I don't want to compete with anyone. But it has died twice and been replaced for free twice. Next death, the fitbit will be history.
I just use it to track my progress. I have no friends on fitbit.
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