Living the Fitbit life

We can get the same amount of walking in even when we travel to a new city, we used to slack off sometimes when we travelled because we didn’t have a “route” to follow. Now we just go and often walk until we get to 1/2 our goal and turn around. Meanwhile we get to see so much more of the city we’re visiting. Our last trip to London we had so much fun we walked 8 miles out before we realized we needed to head back to the hotel.

We bought them for my Mom and Dad. My dad who is “Seventy something” walks me into the ground every day. He is on the west coast and we’re generally on the east coast. Every day he would beat me by 2,000 or more steps. I thought maybe my dad was taking advantage of the time zone advantage he had over me. To test this I stopped syncing for a couple days and then sync’d “all at once” and I managed to beat him. When I confronted him with this data he laughed and said “What else is an old man to do then to walk his son into the ground!”

My best friend has one also and he often loves to taunt me when I’m a bit behind. When we travel we usually smash his weekly records into the ground and the taunting goes the other way!

I’m an avid MMORPG player and since getting a fitbit it has slowly taken place of leveling toons or getting that next cool piece of gear. I have managed to make my life more of a game and enjoy the benefits of being more active while feeding that competitive part of my brain that want’s to win.

The only thing we love more is we have a Withings WiFi scale, tracking our weight along with activity and intake (Lose It! App for iPhone) makes for a pretty nice trifecta of tools to help meet personal goals. It also makes it easy when I slip up, I can look back “Ohh yea I really slacked off that week because of x, y or z”.

I have lost several of these and always replace them immediately. For a time my wife and I actually kept one in her travel case because we lost one when we were traveling and were crushed that we couldn’t replace it the very same day. We gave that one to one of our daughters and needless to say she’s in love with it.

Funny story: I lost one in New York city on a rainy night in December of last year. When I figured out it was gone my wife and I retraced our last walk and we found a fitbit in the rain but it wouldn’t turn on. I assumed the rain got to it so I took it home in hopes of reviving it. When I got it dried off I plugged it into the charger and it pops up “Hello Frank”. I laughed so hard I couldn’t stop laughing for ten minutes. My name isn’t Frank. We never found mine, I hope Frank found mine and reloaded it on his account. I’m still using Frank’s FitBit (Thanks again Frank) and happy to say it’s been a good companion in my day to day life.

After Hurricane Sandy we had to walk up and down 36 flights of stairs because our building lost power. We made 36 flights very quickly and my heart rate (Heart Rate iPhone app) returned to normal very quickly. (Sorry not going to share too much here lol). If we had tried this before we would have been DOA half the way. We made several trips up and down over the course of a couple days and we had to walk from downtown to mid-town for many things because so much of the area was without power.

This is the bit I'd be interested in. Some data to correlate the improved "fitness"[1] (or at least increased activity) with improvements in other metrics.

I'll be gathering such data sometime soon as, altohugh I'm reasonably active, I'm aiming for an Ironman triathlon in 2016 and I'm a long way off being in the right shape for that right now. Whilst I aim to lose the 20kg or so I need to lose I'll be gathering data including: HR (whilst exercising), weight, cycling power output (PowerTap hub).

Although my exercise regieme will vary there will be certain exercises I do every week:

* An hour of 5-a-side football (compare distance covered and average HR)

* A couple of specific training routes on the bike (time, power output, HR avg, segment times)

* Running (time, HR avg, etc)

Having the data to play with is a good motivator in itself!

1. Very hard to actually measure or even quantify.

Is it sync, or synch? The 'h' really bothers me for some reason.