Midpoint of 2022 perambulation update

As my own running has become less and less worth formally tracking, the exercise sector's data-processing companies have kept inventing ways to engage our* interest

2022 won’t be halfway over until roughly noon tomorrow, but the first six months are history.

I’ve mentioned using a watch that keeps track of steps, heart rate and other biometrics whenever it’s worn, and from these data generates “Move IQ Events” based on reasonable inferences. For example, if for 25 mostly unbroken minutes, I have maintained a footstep cadence in the 150-plus range and a heart rate above maybe 110, Garmin credits me with a 25-minute run. A cadence of closer to 90 and a heart rate in the 80s gets tabulated as a walk. Sometimes, an overly unaggressive jog with too low a heart rate is classified as an elliptical workout.

I use the runs collected this way mostly to assure myself I’m averaging around an hour a day or running. I always “know” this is true in the same way you all “know” your average highway driving speed is between 60 and 80 miles an hour despite occasional gridlock and just-as-occasional segments of 95 MPH across the Utah desert.

At some point in the past few minutes, you might be wondering whether I’m aware that these watches have a function that allows for far greater specificity than this, including pace to the fraction of a second per unit distance. I am! And because you probably know I know this, you might be tempted to put on your psychologist hat and speculate that I have an explicit desire to be unaware of my demonstrable capabilities as a runner, even (and maybe especially) at unchallenging effort levels. If you’re an actual psychologist, fine. The rest of you are just making judgments based on the loudly and undeniably obvious.

I do have an interest in Garmin’s providing rolling totals over 7-, 28-, and 364-day time spans. (Whole years are also available, but that gets complicated, especially in leap years.) If my total number of steps doesn’t change much from one week to the next, I’m being consistent in the immediate term. If it’s around the same from one month to the next, I’m being consistent in the short term. And so on.

All of this is fundamentally an indexing of solid underlying physical health, coupled to documentation of a willingness to protect or expand it, or at least move around, no matter what else is happening.

In the one-week period ending yesterday, I covered 113 miles or so. That’s unusual and wasn’t related to a conscious awareness of the month or the half-year ending. It is also a coincidence that I had eked out just over 400 miles in the past four weeks and just over 4,000 in the past 52 at the time I chose to collect these screen shots.

Lately I have been leaving Rosie at home for more of my runs than not. It’s warm even in the evenings for a dog, and we “make up for it” with increased walking. This has had the mostly unintended consequence of me doing a higher number of sustained runs for longer than an hour, and running a little faster no matter how long I’m out there.

It’s also easier to daydream about racing when I’m by myself, because Rosie is ever on rodent and general pest patrol when we’re running. In fact, she selects turns at path intersections she knows from even one-off experience will lead to high concentrations of either prairie dogs or rabbits. She can be very stubborn about this. Because I prefer to keep her entertained, I run rodent-rich routes knowing that this increases my level of injury risk. This is because Rosie will occasionally freeze when she suddenly sees a threat like a two-pound squirrel at close range, and she can go from seven or eight miles an hour to zero far more quickly and gracefully than I can.

As long as I focus my attention almost unwaveringly eyes-forward, I can anticipate these events a few critical fractions of a second in advance and avoid mishaps. But the other day, while Rosie was on rodent patrol, I was unwittingly on MILF patrol and was assessing other creatures in the environment in my own hapless way. The result was an abrasion with little contusive impact, making this wound, which resembles something from an old slot machine display, look worse than it is.

It feels really good to be able to do whatever I’m doing. When I look at the totals above, I don’t see anything outrageous; that’s probably 50 miles a week of running since this time last year, with a lower standard deviation than my walking mileage. But that’s a lot of moving around and a lot of outdoors experience (suburban jungle version, mostly). That’s been indispensable, especially when I’ve gone on road trips and gotten to see new literal territory.

Also, most of my friends, even younger ones, deal with some kind of serious injury over any given one-year period. I’m happy to have ducked that version of malaise without being especially proactive, or at all proactive (I have no rational resistance to donning worn-out shoes, for example, and I subsist mostly on garbage and wildfire smoke, like that Godzilla antagonist).

Anyway, thinking more about racing as well as running by myself usually leads to tentative workouts and a willingness to race. I have to decide if perturbing the mixture of data that seems optimally soothing to my psyche has any upsides. It will all depend on how I respond to the absolute need to create age-appropriate goals while maintaining the idea what once a gun goes off, I’m there to race everyone and mostly myself. Other older runners who look like they are working hard still seem like anomalies to me, as if I want to suspend myself in 2001-2004 when I was at my peak Now why would I be inclined to do that?