Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

There is an old saying:

> If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

It’s a philosophical question that asks whether the human experience of something is necessary for its existence.

I ran into an example of that yesterday.

I was updating my Apple Watch. For the update to work, the Apple Watch needed to be charging and the iPhone needed to be nearby it. But I wanted to exercise. I wanted to take the dog on a much needed walk. The update was taking WAY too long, so I went on the walk anyway.

Without my Apple Watch.

Without my iPhone.

Without a watch of any kind to measure the time I was out.

chose a route that I have done many times that usually gives me a twenty minute workout and is about a mile, but I still felt uneasy.

> If a workout is completed, but a gadget is not there to measure it, did it really happen?

Throughout the entire walk, I consoled myself. “I know I did the workout. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t get recorded on my Apple Watch activity tracker. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t get recorded on Runkeeper. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know exactly how long it took me.” All the while, I was uncomfortable because this workout wasn’t being counted in the variety of ways I count my workouts.

My workout was completed and my watch updated and even a day later, I’m still bothered. Why is it that my workout must be documented in order to count? It’s a conundrum that is even more baffling to me than the tree falling in the forest.