The definition of today’s phrase of the day, to “Phone it in…” is provided by the Urban Dictionary, where you can find out what things really mean in modern terms. 

Phone it in: to perform an act in a perfunctory, uncommitted fashion, as if it didn’t matter. Literal – To present something, whether an idea, project, product, etc. by way of a phone call, rather than in person.

Changing perspectives

I got thinking about the meaning of the term “phone it in” as I stepped out the door with my newly acquired iPhone to set up a run on Strava Run. I’ve had an iPhone before for work and used a different run tracking software, but people rave about Strava and in 5 runs it has performed pretty impressively.

Let’s see you try to phone it in from here.

It didn’t really like trying to find me in the hills of Decorah, Iowa. The signal flipped in and out, apparently, and the cloudy skies…do they affect the satellite’s ability to track you? I don’t know these things. I just hit the little button and run.

Dashboard

It is fun to look at the results. The interface of those running and riding apps make it look like you’re flying your own plane. The orange icons on Strava make me happy from the get-go. I just like the color orange.

Honesty

The honesty of these apps, like your pace per mile, for example, are what revolutionizes your workouts. It can be almost depressing if you dislike reality. But forgiving yourself for a moderate effort over 3-4 miles is much better than lying about your pace or the distance you ran. So there’s that.

We can’t call it “lying,” really. Ultimately all lies in running or riding are borne out in competition. You’re either as fast as you’ve been telling yourself or you are not. The clock, it seems, does not make a habit of lying.

Changing metaphors

Which brings us to the original slang meaning of the term, “to phone it in.” It used to mean not giving your best effort, going through the motions or, in business lexicon, not caring enough to be there in person. So you “phone it in.”

In pro sports the really great athletes once in a while appear to be phoning it in. The daily grind of competition in the NBA, for example, seems to wear on players in that sport more than any other. So once in a while a player or two, sometimes the whole team will just “phone it in” and win if they’re lucky, get beat if they’re not.

That lack of effort drives coaches crazy, of course. As well it should. Pro athletes get paid to perform, while athletes like you and I pay for the opportunity to perform. With entry fees topping $100 for many races, especially marathons, the idea of “phoning it in” on race day is absurd.

There’s no way to fake your pace in a marathon if you’re the least bit honest. You can try to claim that you ran a 2:50 marathon as VP Candidate and GOP wunderkind Paul Ryan once did, but people did some fact-checking and it turned out that his real time was much slower. So people catch you at those games. People are smarter than that, which is frankly why Paul Ryan and his running mate Mitt Romney did not get elected. They were “phoning it in” the whole way during their campaign. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.

Your phone is smarter than you too

Now you can’t even phone it in on training runs or rides. Not if you’re using a smartphone to track your distance and pace. Those numbers don’t lie. So we’re faced with a situation in which the previous meaning of an insider’s term for athletic performance has been turned on its head. Phoning it in suddenly means you’ve recorded your workout in no uncertain terms. You can even post it for public viewing if you like, or compete with other people on the same exact training or racing routes. Of course, you can also run somewhere great, break out your smartphone and make a video of the things you’ve seen or the places you’ve gone. That has nothing to do with measuring performance, but it does sometimes help you measure the quality of your experience, like this short video I made after running up the hills above Colorado Springs at 6:30 in the morning.

Phoning it in? Well, you’d better pick up the pace a little. If you’re riding a known route with a particular stretch of hill on which everyone measures their time, now you’ve got to dial it up a notch or risk looking like a slacker.

Technology is amazing, and we cannot deny that it is changing our lives. Now it’s even changing the entire meaning of a once popular term for slacking into a literal term for an accurate measure of your efforts.

Makes you wonder what a phrase like “tripping the light fantastic” might mean someday.