Incentive/Disincentive

I love using my smartwatch to track my activity. I have it synced to all sorts of activity and nutrition apps on my phone, too, to provide me with as much data as possible. Although I use the goal feature on several of those apps, I am not a fanatic about meeting the goals so much as I am about recording the relevant information, because you know what they say about data collection-- garbage in, garbage out. And I do like to know when I've bettered my past accomplishments; at my age, it's good to have reminders that there is still a chance to improve physically.

Last week we were half a mile or so into the holler on our way to the waterfall when our phone service dipped out. I wasn't concerned; I had downloaded the map of the Graveyard Fields hike onto my phone, and so I just switched from the internet to the saved file. 

A little while later it started to sprinkle and then rain in earnest, so we waited out a 10-minute cloudburst under a pine tree. By the time the storm rolled by, the stream was double its size, the trail was much muddier than when we started, and our feet were soaked when we made it back to the main loop. 

Even so, we pushed on to the second falls, and our dirty dog, Lucy, got cleaned up by taking a dip in the swimming hole at the top of the chute. A brief climb back up to the Blueridge Parkway brought us back to our car, and we turned back toward Ashville for a shower and dinner.

Somewhere along the line, my watch battery died, as it does more and more lately, especially when it's tracking my activity. It is an earlier model, though, and I understand what I have to put up with until I choose to replace it. 

But the next morning? I didn't understand what was happening after I fastened my watch to my wrist. All the activity indicators started going crazy, and there was a lot of dinging, too. When at last my device settled down, a few taps here and there failed to explain what the big deal was, so I reached for my phone. There I noticed that the trail app was still open, and having finally connected to wifi again, was giving me credit for hiking not only the 3-mile Graveyard Fields trail, but also the 39-mile drive home. 

Try as I might, I couldn't delete my 42-mile "accomplishment". So there's a garbage record I'm never going to beat.

Or will I?