Revenge of the fitness tracker
- col-teri-stein
- January 28, 2023
- 552
I was successful last year in ignoring all my sleep stats on the fitness tracker. The fitness tracker gives you a score for how well you sleep every night, and then it makes it impossible to get a good score. If you even move an arm during the night, it seems to count it as you woke up and deducts points from your score. It’s crazy.
Anyway, I quit looking at or following my sleep scores last summer, and I was happy. But the fitness tracker can’t let you be happy. It sent me an email in January 2023 with all my important stats from 2022. It wanted me to know my overall sleep score for last year was only 76 out of 100. I felt like a loser.
Since I quit following the daily score, I was pleased with the sleep I got, but not anymore. The fitness tracker also wanted me to know my average sleep hours per night were only 6.3, which can’t be right. Oh wait, the tracker doesn’t count naps, which are an important involuntary part of my total sleep time.
One thing that might make me change though is it said my average bedtime was 12:34 a.m. That is late, but we do have a bad habit of starting to watch movies we wish we had watched earlier at 11:30 p.m.
And it said my average wake time was 7:05 a.m., which can’t be right. Maybe in the summer, but this winter I think my sleep habits more resemble that of a hibernating bear. I would say 7:05 is probably the first time I rolled over in the morning, so the tracker counted me as awake. If I was really getting up this early, I’d be getting more done.
Anyway, there were more mysteries with this fitness tracker report. I don’t think I started wearing this particular tracker until around mid-April, so these yearly stats aren’t truly that.
Yay, I did a total of 2,776,825 steps last year on the days I was wearing my fitness tracker and didn’t leave it recharging on the kitchen counter for half the week. That’s where my tracker is right now. It needed recharged yesterday.
The fitness tracker correctly assessed my top exercise was walking and that my best step month was May, and out of the whole year, my best step day was May 8. I can’t remember that.
What was I doing on May 8? I checked my 2022 calendar, and on that date, I was at a stat care center, but not for myself obviously or I’d have never gotten that many steps in. The visit was coming back to me, but the rest of the day was still a blank.
I wrote the stats from the email in my diary with hopes to remember later, and in just two short weeks, my feeble brain has come through with the memory of a nonstop afternoon of branch and yard cleanup from a storm, I think, involving my favorite wheelbarrow and some push mowing.
In the midst of all that outdoor work, I wasn’t going to cancel my biggest social activity of the day — walking with my sister. It is part exercise and part therapy. So I took a break in the afternoon to get in about 4,000 extra steps, just for the fun of it.
Thinking back though, that was not a day I’d really like to repeat, except for the walking with my sister part. Getting lots of steps in through yard cleanup is not as much fun as the time Joe and I went to Put-in-Bay, a popular island in Lake Erie with a long history, and decided to get our steps in by not riding the bus or renting a golf cart. We had about 25,000 steps in that day, and that was a day worth repeating.
At my age though, 25,000-step days are few and far between and, seriously, may never happen again. But I am sure my fitness tracker will acknowledge any efforts eventually. Now to just hang on until spring until I am more inspired by sunshine and warm weather to pick up the pace.