This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
“Guess what?! I ran 12 miles! This morning!”
Well, not me. But let’s just say someone did. And they posted it on social media, along with the precise map of the route they took. I would look at that and agree that we have vastly different priorities. I might calculate that that person is roughly a thousand times more motivated than I – and about six cups behind in caffeine consumption plus several hours of sleep.
In a million years, it would never occur to me to wonder: “Where - exactly - did they run?" In my mind, the main achievement is the running. Hell, in my mind, anything done over the course of 12 miles without the aid of wheels or magic, sounds suspiciously like teleportation, except that we don’t have the ability to go that far yet, subatomically.
Honestly, I could care less if the person ran the first two steps upright and was dragged the rest of the way behind a delivery truck. I might get some kind of glee knowing that after a couple miles, an oxygen tank was invoked or a Scout enlisted to get the person to the end. Knowing they ran is enough. The details of their route from point A to point B is just senseless overkill.
Alien life forms, when they check out social media and see the oddly shaped circuits that people claim to have ‘run' before sunrise, must be astonished by our brazen stupidity. “If they want to get to the place they are, why don’t they just stay there?” Finally, someone who gets me.
Now, if you want something more interesting, I have a couple of apps, one of which is called Stalk Me. You run or walk and post the route you take at the same time every day along with the colors you'll be wearing and the fact that you're deathly allergic to peanuts, shellfish and anthrax.
Another, called Slingblade, follows me as I mow my lawn. In a similar vein, there is Map my Crap, which documents the course I might take with my dog and the various spots at which we stop for him to relieve himself and me to collect and bag his specimen.
Social media has led us to believe that we are way more interesting than we are. That the rest of the world wants to know what we’re up to, just because it’s possible to share. For the most part, it’s interesting in a soft news sort of way. Leslie’s baby sprouted a tooth or Fenton has moved to New Zealand. And then there are certain activities that, when posted for the rest of the world, cause me to roll my eyes. They fall into the category of “didn’t ask, don’t tell,” and generally comprise things I could do – like bike to work or raise chickens – but don’t.
If I were to play the game, however, my serious vicarious-living app contender would be Map My Nap. It promises to be about as interesting to the average netizen as the twists and turns exacted by runners who post the paths of cement they have pounded before most of us have pulled our jammies out of our butt cracks.
It depicts the various stages of my sleep cycle and the path taken by my slumbering self from point A to point B. It would look something like the chalk form drawn around a body at a crime scene with a couple of infinitesimal traces of motion made inadvertently and barely enough to register on my motion-detecting camera. The most marked proof of any movement registered at all might be the path I cut through a swath of crumbs, showing you not where I “checked in” but where I checked out after my snack.
At this point you might be picturing someone embodying an anti-athletic physique, and I assure you this is not the case – in spite of the nappy snacks. It's just that I have decided running is fake news, especially if it takes place during those hours which don’t exist, before the sun comes up. You can show me maps and apps and how we’re now supposed to do it in bare feet, but you will not convince me of running. I even have a Fitbit which proves walking, but I don’t, however, feel it’s necessary for anyone but my big booty to know where it went. Slowly.
I know, I know. All that epinephrine coursing through your body after you've completed your six, or eight or 10 miles, makes you want to share the experience. Well, how about the urine-soaked tunnel your running shoes slap-slapped through the park? Where are the photos of darkened store-fronts or the dew on the grass of the neighbor's lawn? What of the scowly morning people walking their dogs in bathrobes or the smokestacks of local manufacturing plants cranking up for the day ahead? Those would be the interesting points, but, well, they might detract from all the bragging about you. You ran 12 miles? Fantastic! That’s more than I will run. Ever. Cumulatively. And, trust me, I'm impressed that you ran. I just don't need the proof provided by a map of the streets, cross-streets and corners, or backwoods paths that exist in a place I may never go.
Just so you know, my other new app, Map the Map of Your Run, is able to detect whether or not you got from point A to point B on piggy back, stretcher, hoverboard – or more likely, car – or if you traversed that route at all. Because it could be that you have the app, Map the Run I'd Run if I Ran. At which point I'd use my app, Zap Your Map to call you out.
Now, I can see that my Fitbit has just tacked on another 1,000 steps, likely because it counts keystrokes. So do I. It seems a bit hypocritical that I've just posted these thousand tiny moments of my exercise regime for public consumption. I hope they were more interesting for you than my last nap.
The Overhead Bin is a bi-weekly column written by Dana Gonzalez
