My aunt Heather was a bit of a mentor for me, from the time I was 14 and she found me naked in the garden after drinking a bottle of Johnny Walker, up until the days when we lived on our farm with our little boys. She was an original WWOOFer, from the early ‘70’s when they first started. She squatted in a little cottage in Sussex, where she raised her two children. She sailed across the Atlantic and was thought to be lost at sea. She told us of the farmer down the road in Sussex who would head out to the field in the spring and drop his trousers, put his bare bum on the soil, and declare wether it was warm enough to plant.
Last Sunday I ran a race which was billed as a “family friendly, non-competitive” event. It was super hilly, and very hot. Although it started early in the morning, by mid-morning we were all suffering and on some of the ascents you could see groups of people huddled under what little shade there was along the trail. I walked much of the uphills, and ran downhill and on the level. It was absolutely beautiful - the trail follows a pilgrim route through northern Italy and we were running on ancient stone roads and crossing medieval bridges. When I finally arrived at the finish line, I felt weak and dizzy and I drank an ice cold Coke and gobbled down a gelato immediately. The day after I felt pretty stiff, and I synced my Garmin to see how I’d done. I knew my time wasn’t great, but I like to record my runs and keep an eye on weekly mileage and elevation.
What? Now I knew why I was feeling so stiff and worn out! A whopping 3402 meters elevation! That doesn’t mean I ran up 3402 meters, it means that altogether if you add up all the ascents that I made, it added up to over 11,000 feet! Wow. I sent that screenshot around to my family and my runner’s group. I compared the elevation to a race I wanted to do, but I felt there was too much elevation and a cutoff of six hours… but wait, that race is only 1100 meters!
I felt so proud of myself, and good, and like I had really accomplished something. But over the few days since the race, I realized something was wrong. I didn’t feel THAT stiff. How could I have achieved so much with so little preparation and hard work?
Answer? I didn’t. Weirdly, my Garmin watch had somehow decided that 3402 feet was actually 3402 meters. When it synced, it reproduced the same mistake on to Strava, where I got such a fanfare and pats on the back. But it wasn’t true. It was 3402 feet, which is good, great even, for a tired Granny in over 30 degrees C. But for a while there I had been misled by technology, believing that it was right, righter than what my own body was telling me.
I. also use Runkeeper, another running app. And me and my sister think it’s hilarious that every time I do a run longer than about ten k, it shows her a map of my run where I am running back and forth from her house to the pub. On Mar 1, 2025, when I ran fifty miles, I went back and forth about a hundred times!
Funny not funny. I’ve seen technology get the better of us time and time again in the birthing room, when the tools tell us one thing and the laboring mother tells us the truth. It tells us we are fast when we’re slow; we’re famous when we’re not. It tells us it’s raining outside when it’s clearly not raining. And now, we can even get stuck in an opinion loop where the technologies involved in the maintenance of the social media tell us the same things over and over again, and convince us that “most people” think the same way. The tragedies that are happening all over the world due to erratic and extreme weather conditions are exacerbated because we have been taught to rely on technology, instead of following our own good sense.
Am I a Luddite? No, absolutely not. I don’t think we all need to drop our pants and head out to our suburban lots to see if it’s time to buy our seedlings. (note to self: would be funny though). I am so grateful that there was a world of technology available to save my husband’s life in 2012. I’m grateful that I can keep connected with my family and friends, that I can call for help if I need it, that I can track my runs and record my heartbeat.
And yet, enough is enough. We do need to reach back inside to our bodies and remember how things feel. Is the soil warm? Does it smell like rain? Is bad weather coming? Is this wind weird and should I run to higher ground? What is this pain? If I breath deeply does it go away? Did I really run 3400 meters uphill? Or did I do a modest 3402 feet, in six hours. Am I ok? Are you ok?
Remember, spread love, spread joy, question authority.