To Wearable or Not to Wearable

I’m not a shopper. I know people who go shopping for fun or relaxation but that’s never been me. Most purchases, excepting food, can take me months, and then I don’t realize how long I’ve had something. I realized once I was calling something my “new” jacket when it was already over ten years old. Some of this is that I don’t care about fashion that much so if something still fits and still functions, I keep wearing it. Another part is that I what I do buy most often is technical clothing for sports. These are sometimes very expensive and as long as that Gortex or whatever is still doing its job, then there’s no reason to change. Other than that, I wear shirts with holes in them. I darn socks. I go to thrift stores. Yeah, that kind of person.

Now I’m having a big hesitation about these wearable technologies to measure fitness and the like. I’m having trouble with identifying what part of my flagging energy levels are due to simple, normal aging, and what is because I’m maybe being a bit lazy, or maybe I really am more tired with the same effort that I made in the past. And wouldn’t it be good to keep track of my blood pressure?

I like to do things in the mountains and it’s good to keep up a certain level of fitness. This can be both for projects, a planned hike or a summit, or sometimes just to have more options, like “I wonder if this path is pretty” and not worrying so much if I can make it to the end and back or not.

But I’m slowing down, objectively and subjectively. Last week I had a hike with some sporty students at a place that I’ve hiked hundreds of times. I was huffing and puffing behind them, but in the end they were about as fast as my fastest time ever. I don’t feel so bad but it was the pain involved that’s new. It didn’t used to hurt so much to go faster. I would simply try and be unable to go faster it whilst now it hurts to even try. But is it all in my head? Would a tool to help me measure my actual fitness level as opposed to my perceived level of fatigue make any difference?

I probably won’t buy one of those fitness trackers, but I’ll look at them for a long time. I don’t need a thing like that. No one does. They are not at all necessary by any definition. But they’re kind of cool. But they’re kind of expensive. Would I actually wear one? Would I use it? (But they’re kind of cool.) See how it goes? And this will continue until I finally make a decision. This is why this sort of thing takes me months, an impulse purchase attenuated by time, like somehow taking four months or whatever to decide on something makes it more worthwhile when it will always remain nothing that anyone actually needs.

But Foro was an impulse purchase, a rescue from a line of hanging kid’s toys in a supermarket. I could see his intelligence, his superiority among all the other cows hanging there. (Okay, I’m not entirely making this up. The cows are hand sewn and really do have different expressions of their faces. I only know this because I’ve…um…collected one or two). Sometimes an impulse purchase can bring months and years of happiness. Foro was definitely worth it.