The best parts of life are unquantifiable

Meditations on a running watch lost and found

I run long distances for fun. Well, not fun really, but something approaching it: satisfaction, equilibrium, maybe even joy. It keeps me in shape, gives me more energy, makes me feel good. And it’s meditative, the steady plodding of my feet on the earth an excellent counterpoint to my own thoughts. With nothing to distract me but that pounding rhythm, with my blood singing in my ears and down into my pumping legs, my mind is free to wander, to explore and develop ideas that elude me sitting at a desk.

Nothing to distract me, except the sights and sounds of my route, and my running watch.

Not my watch, not my wrist.

I started running with a GPS watch over a decade ago after years of guessing my speed and distances. The watch told me my pace both instantaneously and over the last mile. With a few button presses I could page through my workout history and see my times and splits for all the runs I had gone on with it. And it had a clunky cable that could attach it to a computer, and from there upload that information to the internet, first to Garmin’s own activity logging site and then later to Strava, which is like Facebook for people who exercise. As of this writing I have well over a thousand runs logged there, chronicling my shuffling all over the cities I’ve lived in and visited.

Over the years I went through several different watches as they wore out or were lost, and at one point after losing yet another such $200 gewgaw I decided I couldn’t justify the expense of paying so much for something I couldn’t trust myself to keep track of. So I resolved to ditch the quantified life and run by vibe again, like how I started.

It sounds like such a small difference, to know objectively how fast you’re running or to simply not know, to just run at the pace that feels right to you. Over thousands of miles with a GPS watch, I’d learned what a 7-minute mile felt like, a leisurely 8-minute mile, a dog-slow 9. My body already knew how fast I was going, why did I need a watch to tell me? Such a small change — losing the ability to look down at my wrist and confirm that, yes, I was on a 7:35 pace and was rounding the 2-mile mark of my usual route — and yet it felt for all the world like a completely different activity. Without a metric beyond my own body to nudge me to speed up or to slow down, I found myself listening to that body, inhabiting it, much more fully, much more presently. I found myself savoring the sensation of those endorphins-fueled footfalls, the rhythmic tide of breath and steady drum of heartbeat, rather than attending to raw data about how far each one was carrying me. I came into myself and the activity I was engaged in, allowed myself to go faster or slower based on my own sense of self and passing whims. Over time I forgot why I ever needed to quantify and record my runs in the first place. I simply ran, and reveled in the pleasures and pains of each moment.

I think about that last lost watch a lot, and I think about my kids. I think about the total commitment fatherhood requires of me, a commitment of my time, my energy, my attention, my faith. I think about the joys and terrors on the journey of raising them with my wife, about the fights and scuffles and screaming, about the puke and the shit, about the jubilation and belly laughter and tears. And I think how glad I am that I quickly outgrew a brief phase of the reddit nihilism that has convinced so many people to opt out of that journey.

There is no such thing as a happiness ruler that you can hold up next to a person to determine how much they enjoy their life. There is no statistical measure that can compare the life satisfaction of parents with non-parents in any meaningful, objective way. And even subjectively, when you ask parents what matters most to them, what brings them the most joy in their life, nearly all of them say it’s their kids. But on the other hand, when you survey those same parents in the large and ask them how happy they are, you’ll find a small but persistent drop in that self-reported sense of well-being, at least while their children are young. And the small uptick in self-reported happiness of parents in old age is even smaller than the drop during child-rearing.

And yet, when you ask the all-important question: “would you trade your kids for your freedom and your money? Would you do it over again?” Parents respond with absolute conviction. They choose their kids, despite it all.

I think about the money my wife and I spend on our kids’ catholic schooling, about how those same redditors mock the idea of private school as an offensive folly. After all, the data show no difference in adult earnings and achievement among private school kids after controlling for IQ, so the argument goes, so why not send them public and save that money, put it in a trust fund to be awarded as a lump sum when they turn 25? Surely they’ll appreciate that more. And indeed, on every objective metric — test scores, activities, student to faculty ratio, and of course cost — our local public school is at least as good as the parish school our kids attend. But GreatSchools rates by what they can measure, and nobody has yet invented a community engagement ruler worth a damn. We know from talking to our peers in the neighborhood that the neighborhood school is totally lacking as a community of shared values, which is what matters most to us. Of course my kids will be OK academically regardless of what school I send them to, they’re my kids, they’re all whip-smart. But there is no amount of money given to a 25 year old that can substitute for a wholesome schooling experience in a true community that shares your values. The two things are not fungible, and one matters more than the other.

After a few years of vibe-running, my wife surprised me on father’s day with a new GPS running watch. She knew that despite my objections to the contrary, I did miss the quantification of my exercise routine, the little objective markers that I was improving toward some goal or simply holding steady against the march of advancing age. This one had a heart rate monitor built in too. I never could bother wearing the chest strap the older ones required.

And so I started wearing a watch while running again, and getting kudos from friends for my ever-slowing mileage on Strava. I try to keep the vibes pure by not attending to its metrics too often, keeping it purely informational rather than letting it nudge me up or down. I fail as often as I succeed, but overall I find it hard to say no to the information. Despite my reservations, having the information is just too compelling to pass up.

The new watch tries to tell me how hard a run was by giving me a recovery time in hours after it ends. Today’s run, while I chewed mentally on this essay, felt fantastic: I had energy to spare, my legs felt light, my breath was steady, and I ran with a smile on my face. But although I felt fine, my heart rate was in a much higher aerobic zone than the charts recommend for a man my age, and when I looked at my watch before my stretching, it delivered a recovery time verdict of 58 hours.

Preposterous. I’m going running again first thing tomorrow morning. And I’m bringing the watch.