The Numbers Don’t Lie

I’ve had an Apple Watch for a few years, and liked it enough to upgrade to the latest (Series 6 at this writing). Much like the Garmin it mostly replaced, the  Watch will keep track of my activity during the day, and then it keeps track over a period of months to see if you’re trending toward “more active” or “less active”. The watch will also do a crude measure of VO2Max, which is one indicator of fitness. It will also measure a rough approximation of calories burned throughout the day. And then pretty graphs are produced.

In order to measure that number, the wearer of the watch needs to get their butt out the door and go for a walk or a run so that the watch has something to measure. I was amused by the big gaps in December/January and March. December is explained by The Medical Ordeal which knocked me out of contention for about a month. And then juuuust when I was walking enough each day to start to keep the numbers steady, the second surgery comes and leaves a gap. That gap in September? Wildfires, when no one was doing much of anything outside. I don’t know what the hell was going on in June and July.

I don’t have much of a point to make with this, other than the obvious (have surgery, and you might not do a lot of exercising). I’m easily entertained by charts that correlate to the roller coaster of a year we’ve had, I suppose.