Our two-mile drive to the fitness center was all for naught this morning. It was closed for business due to overnight temperatures exceeding twenty-five below zero.

Plenty of places have been closed for business across Illinois. Workers in a wide variety of fields have either taken a day off or worked from home if their jobs allowed.

In my case, there’s hardly a function of my employment that I can’t do remotely. So I had a pretty productive day. For better or worse, that’s how communications works these days. The interconnected world never shuts off.

Screen time

This is neither a good or a bad thing. It just is. Every week my phone offers a screen time assessment to tell me whether I’ve spent more or fewer minutes and hours checking email, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin and more.

More than most people thanks to my line of work, this is my world. Sometimes it wears on me to be “on” 24/7 in case there are messages critical to my job cropping up that require action.

Hook me up

Yet when it comes to escaping all this digital communication through fitness activities, technology has chased us down there as well. I’ve long been a Strava user, the app that tracks your every step of a run and every inch of a ride. Or thereabouts.

Then there’s Garmin. My new Fenix 5 watch does amazing things including measuring my heart rate, aerobic versus anaerobic efforts and stress levels. It lists about twenty activities one can measure from indoor cycling to taking a dump. Well, that’s not quite true. The dump part. But it does measure Body Mass Index, and you could probably subtract that last bowel movement and get an accurate number of what’s inside if you really tried.

Data points

Which is exactly my point: There are some things that simply don’t need to be measured. That’s one of the tarsnakes of training these days. The data is all great, but the point of working out isn’t really found in all those numbers and figures. It’s ultimately how it makes you feel that matters.

Which is why there are days when I openly leave all the gadgets home and just go out and run or ride. I also never perfectly relax in the pool unless I leave the watch off. Just keep swimming…

The point here is that it truly can help to take a few moments where you are Closed for Business when it comes to all that data. Just let some things happen rather than measuring every twitch and fart that you accomplish.

There’s an art to embracing the idea of Just Do It and all variations in between. We should not forget that in the wave of information washing over us daily.