Why I Put the Watch Away
People ask me what my splits are. What my heart rate zone is. What the app says my recovery score was this morning.
I don't know. I stopped wearing the watch.
I want to be clear that this isn't a stance against technology. I tried one for about a month, a real fitness watch that Maria got me for my birthday, and it worked fine. It told me my heart rate. It told me my pace. It buzzed at me when I hit some zone it thought I should care about. The problem wasn't the watch. The problem was me. I kept looking at my wrist instead of the trail. I'd glance down to check a number and miss the place where the path narrows, or the root that's about to catch a toe, or the way the light was coming through the trees that morning. I was walking through the canyon and reading a screen the whole time. That's a bad trade.
So I went back to counting my own breathing. That's the whole system now. No app, no wrist buzz, no zones.
What I do instead
Here's the practical version, the thing you can actually use.
While you walk, try to talk. Not shout across the trail, just talk in a normal voice, a few sentences at a time, to whoever's next to you or out loud to yourself if you're alone. If you can get a full sentence out without gasping for the next one, you're at a pace you can sustain. If you can only manage three or four words before you need another breath, you're working harder than a beginner should be working on flat ground, and you should ease off.
That's it. That's the test. I call it breathing you can talk through, and it costs nothing and never needs charging.
The reason I trust this more than a heart rate number is that a number doesn't know you. It doesn't know you slept badly, or that the dry air up here is making you work harder than the same walk would at sea level, or that you're nervous about something at home and your heart's already up before you've taken a step. Your breath adjusts for all of that automatically. A watch just reports a number and lets you decide what to do with it, and most people decide wrong, myself included.
The opinion I'll stand behind
The watch is optional. The water is not.
I care a lot less about your heart rate zone than I do about two things: are you breathing hard enough to talk in short sentences, and did you bring enough water for this air. Utah County air is dry most of the year, and at our elevation you lose more moisture through your breath than you'd think, even on a cool morning. You can skip the gadget entirely and be fine. You cannot skip the water and be fine.
I learned that one the hard way.
The July walk
This was a hot day, the kind where the trail's baked dry by nine in the morning, and I told myself I didn't need to carry as much water as usual because it was just an easy loop I'd done a dozen times. I got to the turnaround with an empty bottle and about a mile and a half still ahead of me, uphill on the way back, in full sun, at an age where I should have known better.
The walk back taught me something I'd already read a hundred times in fitness magazines and articles online and never quite believed until my body made me believe it. Thirst shows up late. By the time you feel thirsty you're already behind, and out here, behind means a slow walk back with your mouth dry and your head starting to ache and nobody to blame but yourself for not carrying enough.
Nothing terrible happened to me that day. I got home, drank a lot of water, felt foolish, and wrote it down in my notebook so I wouldn't forget it. But I think about that walk back every single time I'm deciding whether to bring one bottle or two, and I always bring two now.
Putting it together
So here's what I'd suggest, if you want to try walking without the watch for a stretch:
Leave the fitness tracker at home, or at least turn off the buzzing. Bring more water than you think you need, especially once we're doing longer distances later in this course. Check your pace by talking, not by a number. And if you catch yourself missing the trail because you're staring at your wrist, that's the sign to put it away for good, at least while you're out here with us.
The watch is a fine tool for a lot of things. It's just not a great tool for teaching you to pay attention, and paying attention is most of what this whole class is about.
Before next time
Leave the fitness watch at home for one flat walk this week, even if it's just around your neighborhood, and pay attention to your talking test instead. Bring a second water bottle along while you're at it, just to get used to the extra weight.