I never used to track my walk to the shops – but a new smartwatch does it for me.
As part of my quest to travel the distance of Route 66 in two years, I use fitness trackers to monitor every single run and long walk I go on – using the data from these wearables, I can see how far along the route I am. When it comes to walks, I only track longer journeys, like my hour-long commute. I’ve never considered monitoring my quick visits to the shops, expeditions which typically only take 15 minutes or so. Turns out, I might have been walking way further than I thought. I’ve been using the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, and when it senses that you’ve been walking for more than 10 minutes, it automatically starts monitoring your trip. Sure, when you’re active like me, this results in the battery getting eaten up like a freshly baked brownie/cookie mash-up tray-bake in the TechRadar office, but it’s changed the way I think about my ‘non-workouts’. I have a coffee subscription service for a national coffee chain, and the distance from my home to my nearest outlet, and from my office to the nearest outlet to that, is about the same; plus, when I’m at home, my nearest store is near the coffee shop. All in all, I’d say I make the journey between three and five times daily. Like I said, I normally wouldn’t consider using a smartwatch to track this journey – so for the purposes of my Route 66 venture, every time I made the trip I wasn’t moving at all.
