what the watch can't measure
My watch doesn’t know if I’m tired.
It measures pace, heart rate, distance.
Slowly, without noticing, I started trusting those numbers more than my own body.
Before I had a GPS watch, I judged a run by the ache still in my legs after, by trying to slow my breathing enough to bring my
heart rate down,
by a guess at the distance, and the real number came from a course I already knew.
Now the watch shows everything in real time, and even though there’s a whole scale built to push runners toward
The watch doesn’t compare my run to some ideal, it just tells me what happened. My own sense of pace can trick me, making a session feel better or worse than it actually was. But the watch only solves part of the problem too. It can tell me my heart rate hit 167 bpm, that’s a fact, but not whether it came from heat, a bad night’s sleep, poor recovery, or a GPS glitch. The number is objective. What it means is still on me. I don’t think the answer is to distrust the watch, since it shows me things I’d miss on my own, but it doesn’t replace judgment either. Murakami has a line about marathoners leaning on small phrases to get through the distance: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. The watch can confirm the pain, a climbing heart rate, a slipping pace, but it says nothing about whether that turns into suffering. It just moves where the choosing happens.
None of this is new. Before mechanical clocks, people organized their day around sunrise, the seasons, or what they managed to get done, not a number ticking away the hours. The clock did to the whole day what a GPS watch now does to a single run, it swapped a lived experience for something external and measurable. Oliver Burkeman argues this gave us more than a way to track time, it gave us a new relationship with it, one where time became something to manage, spend well, or fall behind on. Maybe that’s also why a hard run or a good conversation seems to fly by while a boring meeting drags on. The clock marks the same minutes either way. What changes is how absorbed I am in what’s actually happening.
Not every device works the same way. Whoop and Oura rings build their own idea of an ideal, an ideal recovery, night of sleep, effort, and hand me a score for how close I got, even though right looks different for every body. Running data isn’t only personal anymore either. It gets shared and compared, which has real value, but carries the same risk from another direction. At some point the run stops being about the experience and becomes about how it looks afterward, something to prove instead of understand. That isn't the same as chasing a real number for its own sake. 2026 year sub two hour marathon and the new mile world record at 3:42 still get me, and probably nudged plenty of people who'd never call themselves runners into thinking a personal best of their own might be possible. The trap isn't ambition, it's forgetting the run is mine before it's anyone else's. When it feels like play again, when the watch is something I use instead of something I answer to, the numbers go back to being a tool, not a scoreboard.
Maybe the answer isn’t a device at all. There’s something to be said for paying attention to the ordinary: morning light breaking apart through a line of trees, the air changing a couple of miles in, shadows sliding across the road while I run straight through them. No sensor logs any of that. A watch can tell me the run happened, not whether I was actually there for it, or whether it was worth it. Trusting these devices blindly means trading human judgment, uncertain and full of tension, but mine, for the illusion of a certainty that doesn’t exist. That doesn’t make the numbers worthless. I still check my pace, still glance at my heart rate mid run. I just try to let my own sense of things have the final say.
I think about why I started running in the first place, long before there was a watch to check. Not to win anything, not to be first at anything. Just a kid finding out how far the next street went, how much bigger the world got with every block. Maybe that’s still the point now. The watch can tell me my pace, my heart rate, the distance. It can't tell me why I come back out tomorrow, that I'm not racing anyone, that I'm still going at my own pace. In the end, what matters most isn’t what the watch says about my body, but being able to feel good, even without it, about what I’ve actually built.