"[Heather MacLean, an Olympic 1,500-meter runner] realized her watch was draining the fun from her runs. It was especially apparent to her during a low-key stretch when she was simply trying to build fitness.
I hated that every run I went on, I felt like I had to check my pace and my distance and whatever else,” she said. “So I just decided that I was going to lay off it for a while and switch to a regular watch.”
She never went back. MacLean, 28, who now wears an Armitron Dragonfly that she said she picked up for $10 at Walmart, acknowledged that there were certain workouts when a GPS watch would come in handy, like when she did a tempo run by herself. (Tempo runs are faster than easy jogs, and frequently run at a prescribed pace.) But Mark Coogan, her coach, has long prioritized effort over pace, and MacLean logs her training in minutes rather than in miles.
“I know I’m at the elite level now, so not everything is going to be joyful,” MacLean said. “But when there are things that bring me a lot of joy, I’m going to invest in them. And one of those things is the ability to avoid focusing on my pace during my runs.”
Without the pressure of feeling as if she needs to account for every mile — or, perish the thought, post her workouts for public inspection on Strava, the exercise-tracking platform — MacLean has also gotten better about listening to her body. She has no qualms about bailing on an extra workout if she is feeling beat.
“And I’ll tell Mark that I’m going for a walk instead,” MacLean said. “And he’s like, ‘OK!’”
Not using any kind of data made me a better cyclist imo. At my peak this year I rode 80km daily on average and pretty fast. Keep in mind that I was overweight at that point, started out obese this year and that I've never been fit in my entire life. If you only listen to your body your body will take you close to its limits. The first time I felt that my mind wasn't capable of keeping up with what my body wanted to do was on my first 120km ride.
Currently I'm more focused on running and I'm still figuring some stuff out. I think I just got my diet right.
But I'm starting to look for fitness trackers now as I think that I'm getting to the point where I'll run into a barrier without tracking my performance in the foreseeable future.
If you want to stick with cycling, I strongly suggest just getting OsmAnd maps and enabling cycling profile. You can configure map to show all kinds of useful things and have the phone turn off display while riding. It can record your route and other useful metrics but you can avoid having it displayed non-stop.
Thanks but I kinda want to stay ignorant about my cycling. I have a shitty mountainbike I bought for 130€ and due to rigorous training I'm about as fast as a casual rider on an expensive race bike. I don't want to be the fastest, I want to annoy middle aged middle manager type guys who spent a lot of money on equipment by riding their pace. So cycling is more about philosophy and trolling for me.
Okay. Enjoy it then. :)