Howard Chua-Eoan: A fitness tracker rescued me from resolution failure

I’ve been working on my 2025 New Year’s resolution for 12 months now.

The notion got into my head in mid-February 2024 when I wrote a column on the tragic passing of rising marathon superstar Kelvin Kiptum of Kenya. In it, I pondered the decision I made a decade ago to stop running because of knee pain and, to some extent, the money I’d thrown into pounding out the miles week after week over a quarter of a century.

I wrote, “I miss running. Not for the shoes that I spent thousands of dollars on. Not for speed because I was too old to be swift. Not for the accumulation of miles because the scenery eventually repeats, as (the poet A.E.) Housman wrote, like ‘fields where glory does not stay.’ I miss it for that moment in the run when you are almost breathless and yet most alive, when every step has taken you closer to the impossible dreams of (Roger) Bannister and Kiptum.”

Many kind readers shared why they too chose to stop — all wistful. Others sent me buck-up messages — and bits of advice to strengthen my knees so I could run again. I wanted to, very much.

But I trudged along, the sad ex-runner walking my slow-motion battle of the bulge — one in which my waistline seemed to be gaining. I looked jealously at Londoners on lunchtime runs by the Thames or, say, the women in heels doing an Usain Bolt for the bus. Once in a while, I’d dash across the street to avoid bikers oblivious to the traffic lights. Momentary thrills. So, why not try to run again? I brooded.

At about the same time, I discovered that I was overcounting the 7-mile total I’d set for my daily walk. I counted steps (in my estimate, a mile would be 2,000), not realizing that my phone was doing the same in stricter measure for stride and distance. Where I thought I had done six or seven miles, I’d more often than not barely notched five. I’ve tried very hard not to depend on machines — they’ve taken over so much. But all the years I’ve had an iPhone, it’s been tracking me. And, when I fortuitously opened an untried app, there was my walking data.

And so I chose to walk more. I aimed for 8 miles a day to make up for the inadvertent deficit of the previous years. The app told me that some days — often Saturdays or Sundays — I’d rack up more than 13 miles, practically a half-marathon. Last year, I averaged 8.5 miles a day — or 3,100 miles total, more or less the East-West breadth of China. But wouldn’t it have been more impressive to have actually traversed the People’s Republic?

Anyway, at my pace, 8.5 miles of walking takes almost three hours out of the day. I used to run 6 miles in under 60 minutes. I probably couldn’t match that now, but running would help me log the miles more efficiently than walking. At the very least, reintroducing it into my routine would get down my distance goals faster than walking alone. I resolved to start running again in 2025.

Alas, the holiday celebrations of December spilled past New Year’s Day. Fortunately, I had another chance: I celebrate Chinese New Year, which was the last week of January. Furthermore, I paid a couple of hundred pounds for shoes and an all-weather shell jacket before I could find a reason to postpone my resolution to Nowruz (Persian New Year) in March or Songkran (Thai New Year) in April.

At £150 ($190), my U.K.-brand (made-in-Vietnam) footwear was roughly equivalent in price to the pairs I’d purchased while living in New York. I certainly wasn’t looking to get the elite Alphafly, which cost nearly double (Nike Inc. had created it for Kiptum). The outerwear cost almost as much as the shoes. And I had to have a cap. And new shorts, too. And socks.

The first two mornings I ran were cold for London (6C and 10C — 42F and 50F). I’d gone out in lower temperatures in New York in shorts and a shell, so I told myself I could do it. But it was still hard, especially the shroud of chill air that furls around you the second you step outside. I put in what I estimated to be a mile and then a mile-and-a half: I told myself that building from a humble start is probably the wise thing to do for someone my age (65) who’s spent about a decade away from running. But even though my knees held up quite well (thank you reader tips), I just couldn’t do a third run. Psychological inertia froze everything. A week went by and my resolution was spiraling toward defeat.

What was I to do? I learned to stop worrying and fall deeper in love with the health app on my smartphone. More importantly, I decided to throw more money at the problem — and bought its sidekick, a fitness tracking smartwatch. It dovetailed with my own obsessiveness about statistics. There’s nothing quite like committing more hard currency to improve your return on investment — even if it’s all really sweat equity. I don’t even have to fret over the distance I’ve run: the tracker does that for me.(1) Whatever provides you with the data is king: Resistance is futile.

So far, the statistics have reinforced my original beliefs: A two-mile run takes me about 22 minutes and burns up more than 200 calories. An equivalent walk takes more than 40 minutes and uses only about 180 calories. The other day, I ran two-plus miles, walked to and from the office and my favorite coffee spot, paced around the office and by the time a late lunch was over, I’d covered my 8-mile goal. Better yet, my active calorie expenditure was already higher than any day I walked 10 miles.

My running mileage is dinky compared to what I used to record in the past. With luck, I hope to run three 3-milers for a total of nine weekly, still well below my 30-milers of the past. But I’m not out to set new personal bests. I just want to run again.

Even so — and even if they are laughable — I’m seeing that my times improve as runs get longer. My first attempt at a mile took me (ugh) more than 12 minutes. It improved to 11:49 the next time and, without trying too hard, it’s now down to 10:40. I won’t get anywhere close to Bannister’s historic 1954 sub-4 minute mile sprint in my lifetime.(2)

I still worry about my knees. But so far, so good. I’ve got to learn to ease up on walking. It was a good habit when I wasn’t running but the additional wear could be detrimental. After I notched my 8 miles the other day, I still walked another 3 miles. I don’t need to do it as much... if I keep running.

Walking is an essential part of my writing process. It’s great for unclogging mental congestion. In fact, I took several strolls to come up with paragraph transitions for this column. Right now, I find running to be more breath and body than brain. The spiritual elation comes after, from having run, just like the best part of writing is having written.

With more road time, I might be able to think on the run. Right now, I’m just very happy to breathe — and be breathless again.

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(1) Running distances were easy to calculate in Manhattan without electronic trackers. The New York Road Runners club had subdivided Central Park into three-, five- and six-mile circuits. The perimeter path along what is now called the Jacqueline Onassis Reservoir is just about 1.5 miles.

(2) The current record holder for the mile is Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco with a time of 3:43.13; Kiptum’s average speed for the 26.2 mile marathon was an astonishing 4 minutes 36 seconds per mile.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion's international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine.

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