I haven't talked about it in a while so I am going to mention my Garmin Vivo-Active 4 again. It's expensive and to a lot of people it is too expensive for a smart-watch, which is a type of things I always promised myself I would never buy. I got one though and have been very happy with it.
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It's a pretty kick ass watch and I have been a bit bamboozled when it comes to attempting to understand how it could possibly know how much exercise of a particular sort that I have done. It does end up being wildly accurate though in most situations including swimming and even kayaking. The swimming impressed me the most because how does it accurately pinpoint where you are and how far you have gone in a pool? Well it somehow knows and it likely has a lot to do with that green laser thing that is flowing through my wrist all day every day, almost certainly giving me space cancer or something.
I have never tried using the Garmin on a treadmill for two reasons: The treadmill itself keeps up with how far you have run and the main reason is because I hate running on treadmills.
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There are a lot of reasons that I hate running on treadmills but the main one is that it is exceptionally boring. When I am running out and about I at least have the chance to look at things and maybe even meet a person or two. That shit aint gonna happen in the small gym that is in my apartment building and this is especially true since I don't particularly care for any of my neighbors.
Well anyway, I live somewhere that is damn near arctic in the winter and after walking home from the train station that is less than 400 meters from my house and feeling like I nearly died of hypothermia, I didn't want to put on all my cold weather gear to go for a run, which I need in order to maintain my awesome physique. That's sarcasm by the way, I have a normal body for someone in their 40's perhaps a little bit better.
A couple of things to note about this readout. I did not run exactly 6 km, the time I spent running is correct but at the end of a treadmill session the Garmin, admitting that it cannot possibly know how far you went while as far as the satellites are concerned you have been standing in one place, asked me how far the treadmill said that I had run. I don't have the best eyes so I couldn't really see what it was asking me. I don't actually remember how far I went but to me, that isn't important. I try to maintain an elevated heart rate for an hour and don't really focus on much else.
The rest of the stats seem pretty accurate and I was kind of surprised at how high my heart rate got during all of this. I'm a bit impressed with myself actually and I am very likely to believe the heart rate records of the Garmin even more than the other data. Burning near 700 calories in something that wasn't really that difficult but was just time consuming was pretty neat as well.
So while I don't relish the idea of being subjected to running indoors for the foreseeable future there are only two other alternatives and that is to not run at all or to put on my cold weather running gear. This is a normal phenomenon for me, it normally takes me a month or so to become accustomed to the fact that it is freezing here all day and all night for the next 4 months. Once mid January comes around I will be back to running outside.
In the meantime though I am actually pretty happy with the results of the tracking on the Garmin and will continue to monitor my indoor running like this for now.