Coming around a switchback on the new Burnaaga trail on the bikes today, we passed a couple of blokes pulled over staring at their screens. Strava, of course, not that these guys were Stravaassholes, just blokes checking their statistics. These blokes were riding from the top of Wandera Mountain back to Mogo after being shuttled to the top, and, apparently, had ridden a greater distance than that advertised on TrailForks. Doug and I were riding the two way section which, if you also ride Sandy Pinch FT to the top of the old Snake track is about 26 kilometres and 500 metres of elevation gain.
Since I’ve joined the growing cohort of people with a tracking watch (a Garmin or Polar, or some other brand), I have all those statistics – distance, elevation gain, time – available simply by glancing at my wrist. But I really try not to. Years ago, when a Suunto altimeter watch was the greatest wrist worn device you could get, I had one ski buddy (just one) with an altimeter watch and during the course of a backcountry ski day Dave would give us a run-down on our statistics. It was interesting, at the end of the day, to see our total elevation gain (which I never quite trusted as it was always so much more than the map indicated – although a standard Canadian topographic map can hide a lot of smaller ups and downs in a 40 metre contour interval), but I never really wanted to know our statistics during the course of climbing a mountain. If we weren’t at the top, we were not there yet, and if we wanted to summit we had to keep going, data from the watch notwithstanding.
I think that is a good way to be. Set your goal and just keep going until you get there. Don’t worry too much about the details. If you keep going, those details will take care of themselves and it’s way too easy to let your brain convince your body to stop despite the fact that you have no good reason to stop.
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