Tracking Fitness Exercise

It was a beautiful, sunny, cool and crisp Saturday morning last week. Migrating birds flying in southeast direction is another indication of change of season. Instead of our usual weekends' morning walk around the community, we decided to run to the local library and walk back.

migrating birds flying south 

We exited the community and ran east along Hedgecox road, turned at Independence parkway, continued to run to reach the library, which was about 1.5 miles away from our house. Instead of walking to return along the same route, we continued into the neighborhood behind the library.

It was a quiet morning, we did not see anybody in the street or on the sidewalk until we got to the pond behind the library - a man was walking his dogs, a lady was jogging along the pond, a raft of ducks in the pond and a grey heron was standing by the pond which flew to other side of the pond as we ran by.

Since I turned on the tracking app on my phone, I knew how much time and how long I ran, I decided to continue running until I reached 2 mile distance. It turned out that  the loop we ran/walk was just short of 3 miles when we stood in front our house, so I continued to walk a lap around the block. In the end I ran/walked 3.33 miles in 47 minutes, with average speed  at 4.2 mph.

our route this morning

Tracking my exercise is another thing Lily has been encourage me to do. Just like TED talk, I resisted the idea initially. I thought that all I needed to know was approximately how long I walked/ran, and how much time I spent on it, no need to be precise....and previously my iPhone consumed a lot of power while a tracking app was turned on.

When I changed cell pone recently to S7, she helped to install the app S Health, which consumes little power and uses only GPS for tracking. I started using the app all day. I tracked my lunch time walk around campus at work - I knew that it took me 20 minutes for an 1 mile walk - and the app of course is more accurate, but my estimation is within 5% of the app. Even so it was still great to get an bird's eye view of my track, and exact time spent, calorie burned....

Looking at that morning's record, she encouraged me to try 5k! I will give it a try. 

The next day I mapped a 3 mile track within our community, which is nearly the same length as the previous day's , and my estimation was again very close to the GPS calculation.

Tracking exercise is not critical to our fitness, but it does help to keep us on target quantitatively and the data may motivate us to reach the target.