I LOVE technology…no I don’t

I have a fitbit ap on my phone.  It will use gps tracking to map my walks.  Unless…  Yeah.  So I have this LOVELY walk I like to take and just recently got to a point where I could do the whole walk.  It goes partway around a lake.  There is a bridge that spans the lake about in the middle, and you can walk over the bridge to make this walk only 3.5 miles instead of 7.5 miles.  I walked this about 10:30 on Sunday morning.  I put my phone in my pocket and set off, filling my water bottle at the pump where I parked my car.  I went counter clockwise so I could go through the wooded area 1st and not go UP the hill at the 2 mile mark but DOWN the hill at the 2 1/2 mile mark.  All was fine and good when I got to the first bench.  By the way, NONE of the benches is located in a shady spot.  They’re good places to stop and drink water, but if you want to cool off, you’re out of luck.  It’s like sitting on a fry pan.  I paused my fitbit and took a little break.  I hit “Resume” and continued on my hike.  When I had reached the western-most point of the trail, I checked my progress.  It asked me if I wanted to “resume.”  What?  I had resumed!!!!!  I had walked 3/4 of a mile and it said I popped out of the space-time continuum and appeared 3/4 of a mile down the trail!   Well that was disappointing.  I must have accidentally hit the pause button when I returned my phone to my pocket with my keys.  I moved the phone to my back pocket.  I walked another 1/2 mile.  Then I checked my ap and sure enough, I had once again been transported to my current location without walking.  Now I was perturbed.  I set my ap to resume again, and carefully put my phone in so the pause button was facing the outside of my pocket.  Looking at my progress at the next stop, there were dots on my map showing up on the path but no connection.

About at this time, being a bit fried, a bit dehydrated and skittering around the edge of madness, I picture myself magically popping in on the trail and scaring the bejezus out of some yapping little dog taking a crap on the trail, then popping in behind a runner and yelling “On your Left” and then not passing him but popping out.  I imagined popping in on the trail and asking the little girl if she’d seen Harry Potter lately and then popping out again, magically appearing and telling the fisherman to move 50 yards down the trail because that’s where the fish were hiding, appearing before a very fit couple and pleading them to save me before the aliens…ahhhhhhhh!!!!!!

Exasperated, I once again punched the resume button, then closed the ap and finished my trail.  I got to my car and stopped the ap, and it said I’d traveled about 2 1/2 miles in 2 hours.  It was now 12:30 and my face was red and my water bottle was empty, and I KNEW I’d traveled at least 3 1/2 miles.  It reported my pace as 24 min/ mile.  Over the 2 hours I hiked, I should have traveled 5 miles then.

Friday and Saturday, I was at a conference.  Though I tried desperately to stay on my low carb diet and stay under 1200 calories,  I failed miserably on Saturday.  I was 500 calories too high.  I figured this lovely adventure on Sunday would compensate for this indiscretion.  I was wrong.  It takes 3500 cal to equal 1 pound, except when I eat it.  250 cal =1 pound.  2 1/2 miles of walking over a 5 mile trail for 2 hours (stupid fitbit ap) will not compensate because I had exactly the same calorie burn for the day with my walk (1486 burnt) as I did for the Saturday where I did nothing but sit in a conference room all day (1486 calories) and I had exactly 0 steps on my walk–further evidence that I was magically transported through out my constitutional.  So at the gym today with my trainer and my husband, I sneaked a peek at my weight and sure enough, those 500 extra calories I ate on Saturday produced 2 pounds of weight gain.  And all that walk did was make me sore.