“When in doubt, add more instrumentation.”

Azure Grant

September 29, 2017

Have you ever felt that some parts of your life should remain unquantified? Perceived quality of your poetry, or perhaps duration of arguments with your significant other? Until recently, I kept running in my ‘not to be quantified’ bucket. It was such a meditative alone time that I didn’t want to risk disturbing it through observation. I tracked the kilometers I ran and nothing more. That changed at the finish line of a recent 50k, where I learned that my wearable had overestimated the race distance by over 8 k! I was pretty miffed, and I turned to this talk for inspiration.

Thomas inhabits the far end of the quantified running spectrum. His talk from QS17 is a fun watch, and the project page is here.

What did he do? He started out disappointed by hitting the wall midway through a marathon. This is common enough, but Thomas’ response to running a painfully positive split was to code his own negative split plan generator, rubber band split-plan sticky notes to his arm, and set out to run at a concrete pace. His project evolved to include an olympic swimming coach, many new devices, a metronome – and ultimately mastery of the art of pacing.