Looking Out To Sea

I’ve tried in the past to get into tools like Fitocracy, whose gimmick is to make exercise a game in which you increase your high score by recording the physical workouts you do. I failed to get much satisfaction out of it for a couple of key reasons:

• My cycling doesn’t really change, so while I do about 9 miles a day it never goes above that. The total miles covered keeps going up, which does afford more points, but I feel a bit of a fraud all along. I’m not getting faster and I’m not increasing my distance either.
• Capoeira is a dynamic skill-based activity which does not lend itself to measurement with simple numbers like distance, time, mass or speed. To use an analogy, if I could run around really fast and hit tennis balls really hard neither of these would demonstrate I was progressing at tennis. Similarly someone with a less impressive serve and a slower dash could still trounce me if they had actual tennis experience.

I still have a Fitocracy account but I don’t do things which measure easily so I never use it.

Nick recently posted on this, expanding the notion from simple fitness to diverse aspects of life.