Insufficient Data

Dearest Rachel –

Back in the day, when we would see the phrase I’ve used for the title of today’s letter, we would snicker to each other about how “that’s not what Tasha said.” We weren’t die-hard Trekkies, but you didn’t have to be in order to get the joke back then. And yes, it was probably juvenile of us to think it, but given our relationship, what’s the matter with being both a little childish and a little adult at the same time?

Those of you reading over her shoulder, if you know, you know. Otherwise, you may need to look it up – or not, considering the hints I’ve given as to the nature of the topic being covered.

Anyway, that little in-joke between us has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which has to do with my workout routine, such as it is. Setting aside the fact that it’s a challenge – and always will be – in and of itself just to get up every morning and walk the third of a mile (and back, but at that point, it’s not as if I have a choice) to the gym, there’s the fact that the exercise app on my phone has me constantly comparing my activity to that of the previous week. With each visit, I make a point of recording the distance covered on the treadmill, and the app totes the mileage up on a weekly basis to match against its week-to-date tally from the week before. It’s meant to encourage me to match (and preferably, exceed) the effort put in from week to week, and at present, it’s done its job admirably well, as I’ve put in nearly two hours and seven miles more than I had through last week at this time.

But I know for a fact that I’m not comparing apples to apples here. Last week, in particular, Lars and I were halfway into our walk (well, maybe more like a quarter of the way, as we were halfway to where we would ordinarily turn around and make our way back to our starting point) when I responded to a message on my phone. It was nothing significant, just the usual vibration that tells me that I’ve gotten some notification or another – and you know full well how much I hate to have a red dot on any of my apps. In any event, it was enough to cause me to check my phone – at which point, I realized I hadn’t been recording the distance we’d been traveling thus far. I quickly switched the app on to do so, but I probably lost nearly an hour and well over a mile of effort. So while I may in fact be ahead of where I was last week, I don’t really have all the information to determine what kind of effort I put in from week to week.

Moreover, as you might have noticed being mentioned in passing, it’s not as if this weekly walk and the treadmill exertions (which, now that I think of it, sounds like a name for a band, doesn’t it?) are the entirety of the exercise I get in a given day. After all, I’m walking back and forth to the gym, and although it’s not at some calorie-burning incline one way or the other, it should count for something. But it’s not as if they get recorded or anything.

Or do they? Supposedly, the phone itself keeps track of my steps on a daily basis, and has done so fairly faithfully for years now. The problem is that it’s not always particularly reliable. I’ve had times where it shows I’ve taken hundreds, if not thousands or steps in the wee hours when I’ve been asleep; my only guess is that, if I left it on the bed, instead of setting it on the nightstand, it senses my motions and treats them as steps. Moreover, you might remember how I mentioned that Daniel and I had gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand steps in both Halifax and Boston earlier this month? Yeah, about that…

It makes sense, given that it suggests that I take somewhere between two thousand and twenty-five hundred steps to cover a mile – basically, each step covers some two or three feet, which tracks with what I bother to observe – but it’s weird to see it suddenly change weeks after the fact. Is any of this stuff really reliable?

Then again, it may be that I’m too concerned about the minutiae; the fact is, I know that on those particular days, we walked a long way, and burned a lot of calories, and that’s all I need to concern myself about. It’s not like I’m paying attention to (or should be paying attention to) every last calorie as it’s consumed or burned. Still, it’s slightly weird to see such changes from one glance to another.

Anyway, I need to get going, so I will talk with you later. For now, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck; I’m going to need it.