Daily Walk

Connected watches know everything about us. In theory they listen to us 24 hours a day for years in a row. My Apple watch has been on my wrist for over four years, every single day. It has been for swims, runs, rock climbing, via ferrata, office work and more. 

The watch knows how much I walk, when I get up, when I go to sleep, how well I wash my hands, how exposed I am to noise and much more. It also knows whether I am moving energetically or lazily. It knows if I am walking faster or slower. It also knows how rested or stressed I am, by looking at heart rate variability. 

Garmin have had challenges for years. Most of them have been about distance, or vertical climbing. Now they have new Expedition challenges. Each expedition is named after an expedition or adventure by the same name.

List of Garmin expedition challenges

The Camino De Santiago challenge is a challenge to walk 784 kilometres. The Denali challenge is to climb 6190m. There are two Mont Blanc Challenges. The Mont Blanc challenge is to climb 4808 metres whilst the Mont Blanc Circular (Tour Du Mont Blanc is to walk 160 kilometres.

Today I could have taken the scooter to some shops but I went for a walk. The result of that walk is that I reached twenty one thousand five hundred steps. I often take a lot of steps per day. I wish I was walking somewhere more interesting than in circles.

According to Sports tracker my daily workouts saved 4.74 kilograms of CO2 this month.

I was amused during this walk. The wind is so strong at the moment that as I tried to play the Harmonica as I walked into the wind I found that the wind itself was playing my harmonica. If I blew then I won, but if I drew then I was competing against the wind. Boring people get wind chimes. I think that people should get harmonicas instead of wind chimes. Wind chimes are audio kitsch. Harmonicas are not, because they’re rarer.

I walk every single day, whether it’s raining, windy, snowing, a heat wave and more. I like heatwaves because dog walkers usually stay in. We live in an age and society where fear of dogs is not respected. Yesterday I was on a walk and i saw two big dogs. One was on a leash and the second was free to roam. That freedom to roam encouraged me to divert my route to go through a muddy forest.

Garmin allows you to select the number of steps you want to take in a single day, or let it be set automatically. For a year or two I allowed the goal to set. The result is a step goal that fluctuated from 12,000 steps per day to 15,000 steps or more. This was fine, because I ignored it.

A few days ago I decided to set it to a fixed ten thousand steps a day. Many will say that the 10,000 steps per day doesn’t matter, and I agree. I took 21,000 steps today so I overshot the mark by a little.

I went for a walk and by the time it ended the sun had set. I walked with a flashlight in case but didn’t need it. Usually I would have gone for a walk earlier in the day.

We’re having dry weather which means that I have clean shoes, once again. They cut the grass recently but rather than see greenery we see yellow. We’re in March and it already looks as if we’re un June/July, with how dry the landscape is. The sides of the road, where it was once muddy, is now dry and hard. We are in summer dry weather despite being the first of march.

Yesterday afternoon I was looking at the GPS track for a run I did with the 45s and I was struck by how wide of the mark it was, compared to the same run with the Garmin Instinct. With the Garmin instinct the GPS track fits like a rail to the satellite and road map. With the Garmin Forerunner 45s it is quite a way out.

How Big Is The Difference?

With the Garmin Instinct GPS track you can see so precisely that you can tell which side of the road I was running on, as well as when I switched from one side to the other. The GPS track is highly aligned with the walk or run.