We’re Not Here To Keep Our Devices Happy

“Is All of This Self-Monitoring Making Us Paranoid?” The short answer to this question posed by Madison Malone Kircher of The New York Times, in my own observation and experience, is: yes (surprising exactly no one). Kircher’s article, which is not about runners at all but can certainly be extrapolated out to our population, explores the effects that wearable technology and an overload of data has had on users’ mental health. I think this has become a major problem that is only going to get worse.

Let me stick to the lane that I know best: Many runners, heck, endurance athletes in general, are a little bit obsessive by nature. These devices capitalize on that and turn the dial up to 12. Many wearables take the emotion and subjectivity out of activities (including running!) for a lot of folks. People start tracking everything and judging themselves by the numbers, they don’t learn to listen to their bodies very well, and, from what I’ve seen in regard to running and training, they fail (or forget) to have FUN. [Anyone remember that meme where the triathlete is telling his wife about all his training data after a workout and at the end she just looks at him and says, “But was it fun?” It’s funny because it’s true!] Everything has become quantifiable and takeaways are increasingly more binary: pass/fail, good/bad, optimized/compromised, etc.

“I just felt like I couldn’t do anything right to make the ring happy,” Abi Caswell, a bakery owner who lives in New Orleans, told The Times. I hear some version of this all the time, just substitute GPS watch or Strava or some other fitness or nutrition or recovery app for “the ring” in this quote, as if the goal of training (or living our lives!) is to make our devices happy. Just as a reminder: I am not anti-tech or anti-data. Yes, wearing some sort of a fitness tracker and monitoring a few key metrics over longer periods of time is necessary and instructive as an athlete. The problem in this day and age is that we’re overwhelmed by data, much of it useless if not altogether bad, and I think it’s doing more harm than good. These devices and apps are designed to be frictionless in terms of gathering and interpreting data but I think that’s a net negative when it comes down to it. Friction forces us to slow down, tune in, ask questions, and generally be more considerate in our approach.

“They’re like, ‘The device said …’ or ‘The monitor said …,’” explains Jacqueline D. Wernimont, an associate professor at Dartmouth College in the film and media studies department who specializes in histories of quantification. “And I’m like, ‘But what did your body say?’” This resonates in a major way. The most common question I ask my athletes is, “But how did you feel?” The answer often tells me more than just about any data point.