We know what Tracy would say! So I haven’t asked her.
But I kind of like counting things. (“Kind of?!”, asks Sarah)
The issue is this. Mine is broken, falling apart, and we’re a few weeks away from the end of the workplace fitness challenge. My choice is struggle along with the broken one and chuck it at the end of the challenge. I could let those who hate fitness trackers stomp on it for fun! Or buy a new one. If I’m going to buy a new one I’d like to do it now since this one is a pain. I’ll explain in a minute.
An aside: I live in a product testing sort of household. We’re tough on stuff. If it survives my family, buy it. Seriously. Car door handles have come off in my hand. Don’t get me started on the kids. We all break things. So the FitBit tragedy is no big surprise.
What happened? Well, it got wet a lot. I don’t come in when it rains and I do lots of physically hard things. The strap started to fall apart. I bought a new strap. But that never quite worked. Now my FitBit won’t even sync with my the app on my phone and in order to charge it I have to hold the whole thing together with a clothes pin. It looks silly and the not syncing kind of tips the scale. The new strap is purple and while I like purple for the strap it also makes the screen purple and I can’t easily read the numbers.
I’m trying to decide if I should think of the FitBit as an interesting experiment or something I want to continue.
What do I like? I like the heart rate data. I like the social aspects. (Hi mom!) I like tracking sleep.
Steps are easy for me I’ve discovered because I don’t drive to work and I live in a large house and there are dogs in the world. I like hitting the extra big numbers when I travel. But my regular everyday steps are pretty good too. So the step counting is mostly just an exercise in self-congratulation. Go me!
It’s also sort of cool having the time on my wrist again after all these years of not. I like the syncing and I like seeing trends over time. In an ideal world, I’d get a scale that also synced with the FitBit app on my phone and count all the things.
What don’t I like? The aesthetics. It’s ugly. Also, it’s not even ugly and durable. See remarks above. It covers up my beautiful wrist ink, sort of. It’s also expensive. The FitBits with heart rate data are in the $200 range.
So, what’s your two cents? Do you have a fitness tracker? Do you recommend it?
