A Look at #Blaugust Past

I’ve been participating in Blaugust for the past couple of years and I decided to see what types of things I rambled about in the past.

Still working on Fitness

Last year, I was looking at fitness training. I was using a a Fitbit and a Basis watch to track daily steps, activity, and heart rate. This year, I’m doing a similar thing, but I’ve once again lost my Fitbit and there’s a recall on the Basis watch.

Fitbit is a great idea and pretty much works well, but I think I’ve lost 3 or 4 of them. The two different styles I’ve tried from them have both had 2 parts. The first had a belt clip that the tracking device fit into and I lost at least 2 of them. The rubber that the clip was made of became stretched over time and lost the ability to keep the device on my belt. The other device had a watch band that I would place the device into. This was the one I was using last year when I posted about it, but since then, I lost the device – it fell out of the watch band and vanished.

With both of those gone, I decided I had spent enough $$$ on Fitbit.

The Basis watch was a good device that tracked steps and heart rate. I was pleased with it for both even though it seemed to show fewer steps than the Fitbit. But then Intel issued a recall for all Basis watches. Oh well…time to pick something new.

Enter the Fenix and Ōura

So both my fitness devices from last year are gone and I went on a hunt to find something that would work better for me.

I’ve used Garmin for running when I ran marathons and figured I would give them a look. I had a Fenix GPS that I used for a while, but never for everyday situations…this became my primary watch now. It tracks distance, heart rate, steps, almost everything. I never wore it for daily use since I thought the battery charge would not last a full day, but I was mistaken – it works pretty well and I’ve even gone for 2 days without chargin and it still had plenty of juice.

The Ōura is actually a fitness ring. It kinda looks like the Green Lantern ring if it were black. I found this on Kickstarter somehow after I lost me last Fitbit. I figured a ring might work better than the 2 piece solution Fitbit had, and so far, I’m right. The Ōura ring tracks things a bit differently and is focused on Sleep a bit more than the Fenix so they seem to compliment each other well. Ōura tracks heart rate, body temperature, activity, sleep quality and a bunch more. The ring interprets the data a bit more that the Garmin and makes recommendations for how it improve things. It’s a pretty neat system.

Both the ring and watch have apps that connect to my iPhone and to the cloud so I can get more detailed information and analysis and while I haven’t done much with that data yet, I feel good that it’s there and I can look back wherever I want.

I guess the thing I need to work on most though, is actual fitness training. Last year, I talked about a 5k training schedule…well, I never got to that 5k. I still want to though.

Time to dedicated myself to a fitness goal again. One that hopefully I’ll attain this time.