Sleeping in won, and the apps lost

No gym this morning. Let me be honest about why: waking up felt like doing the Lord’s work.

And here’s the thing — those in full-time ministry will tell you ministry is genuinely hard. Fair enough. But waking up for gym shouldn’t be that hard, and unlike actual ministry it did not involve a conversation with the Creator of the universe. So there was no theological cover for it. Sleeping in simply won, on merit, and I’ve made my peace with that.

The run, though, I did. And it was good — 5.38 km, easy, the usual strategic walks, everything moving nicely.

Now, the gadgets. Yesterday I wrote that three devices gave me three different distances and I had a theory I wasn’t ready to publish. Today the evidence arrived, uninvited.

Strava crashed mid-run, recovered itself, and still produced nothing useful. Rubbish.

Samsung Health did something more revealing: it quietly paused itself for nine full minutes. I only noticed when I checked and had to manually tell it to carry on. Its final numbers — 2.26 km, 25:34 — against my watch’s 5.38 km, 34:16. That nine-minute gap between the two durations isn’t a rounding error. That’s the app deciding my walking didn’t count and simply switching off.

Which, if you think about it, is a philosophical disagreement rather than a technical one.

Because my walks are not interruptions to the run. They’re part of it. Strategic, deliberate, the method I’m using to build distance without breaking myself. And on race day next June, walking the hills and the aid stations is exactly how anyone gets through 89 kilometres. Nobody runs all of it. So an app that stops the clock when I walk isn’t measuring my training — it’s measuring some idealised run I’m not doing.

The watch counts everything. The watch stays. The phone can sit this one out.

I still want to test the watch properly against a measured course — a parkrun will settle it. But the mystery of why the numbers disagreed looks solved, and the answer turns out to be a small lesson in disguise: be careful what you let measure you. Some things will only count the parts of the effort they approve of.

The walks count. Every one of them.