Farewell to Fitness Trackers

On ditching wearable tracking devices and the social media-fication of "fitness."

Illustrated by Stephanie Vee

As something of a cynical joke, augmented reality developer Arthur Bouffard just released Fake My Run — a website that does exactly what it says on the box. Don’t have enough free time in your schedule this week to hold onto your Strava segment crown? Is it simply too hard to map out (and run) ever larger penis-shaped routes for the ‘gram? Fret not! Thanks to Fake My Run, you can cut out all that pesky, tedious running stuff to focus entirely on building up your fitness cred for your socials.

Screenshot by Stephanie Vee

In his Twitter¹ post, Bouffard makes it clear that he created Fake My Run more as a social commentary than as a serious product:

Running used to be a very personal sport that was mainly practised to challenge yourself, to improve your physical and mental health, to stay in shape, to compete with others, to discover new parts of the world, etc. In the last couple of years, I’ve seen running increasingly shift towards becoming a social status and way of signalling a lifestyle.

Every activity can be turned into an Instagram story, every marathon can become a TikTok video. And social running apps are the spine, the solid, irrefutable proof of those very achievements.

Like social media though, running posts can be faked. Which is in part why I made Fake My Run. As a way to challenge the culture shift around running. To also prove the good old saying that you shouldn’t trust what you see on the internet.

He’s responding, in part, to the baffling rise of Strava mules — people who will do your exercise for you (for a fee), so you can maintain the grand illusion online that you are a Healthy and Fit Person. I would not have thought this would be a legitimate problem, but I’m honestly not all that surprised to learn that it is, given the unhealthy social media-fication of absolutely everything.

This seems as good a segue as any to a reflection on why I recently tossed out my Fitbit and uninstalled all of my fitness tracking apps.

Fitness Tracking was Bad for Me

I bought my first Fitbit Charge in 2014, back when the screen was simple and tiny. It felt life-changing at the time. I wasn’t unhealthy or inactive, per se, but I seldom went to the gym and was unfortunately prone to spending my free time sitting in front of my computer screen or playing video games.² My Fitbit gave me an activity goal to work towards that was easy to track and visualize, and dammit, I would hit those 10,000 steps every day — even if it meant doing laps around the kitchen before bed.

I didn’t notice it at first, but I quickly became a slave to my wrist-bound taskmaster. The dopamine hit that went along with meeting my daily step goal or “out-stepping” my friends was irresistible. I went from being someone who went outside for a walk maybe once a week, to someone who walked every day. It was, for the most part, a Good Thing™ with perceivable health-related benefits.

Turning Fitness Stats into Engagement

After the initial novelty wore off, I became less focused on meeting my daily step goal, but remained hooked on the tracking aspect of the Fitbit app, and how it could tell a particular kind of story on social media. I shared a cringey amount of fitness-related posts on Facebook during that time, using screenshots of my step count or heartrate during an activity to augment said posts. Every “like” I received motivated me to do more — not just for my health, mind you, but also for generating more impressive screenshots that I could post to Facebook.

Later, when I started working in acute care, my daily step counts became fodder for an entirely different kind of social media post, one that wasn’t focused on fitness at all. I’d hit something silly like 20,000 steps over the course of a gruelling twelve hour shift, and then I’d post a screenshot of my insane step count on Facebook as a grim testament to the physical tolls associated with working in a hospital.

These kinds of posts only increased in frequency and intensity after COVID-19 hit. I couldn’t talk publicly about the trauma and grief of what I was experiencing at work, but my Fitbit stats (20k+ step days, getting only three hours of sleep before a shift, heartrate spikes in the 140+ range during a shift) told that story in an indirect way.

Enter Strava and the Dreaded Fitness Score

Speaking of the pandemic, that’s around the time when I discovered the Instagram of fitness tracking, also known as Strava. I didn’t use the social media aspects of Strava all that much, but the data it generated was more visually impressive to me than the data generated by Fitbit. That “fitness score” feature? I became utterly obsessed with it. Instead of allowing myself to rest and recover on my days off from work, I bumped my fitness score higher and higher and higher. Posting screenshots of that graph on Facebook felt really good at a time when everything else felt terrible.

I ran almost every day, telling myself that it was obviously “good for me,” because my fitness score was increasing. When it became too cold to run outside, I bought myself a stationary bike. I immediately started doing intense 1-1.5 hour rides without giving myself time to build up to that level of fitness. And when I wasn’t on my bike, I was doing the equivalent of mini marathons at work on barely any sleep.

You can probably see where this is all going.

Strava Was My Achilles Heel — Literally

Sometime in the first half of 2021, I woke up in excruciating pain. I remember I’d done a long ride on my stationary bike the night before, and felt some mild discomfort in my right Achilles tendon shortly afterward. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, as I could still bear weight, I didn’t suspect a full-blown rupture, and I was pretty numb to my own needs overall due to what I know in retrospect was profound burnout.

I begrudgingly scaled back the exercise for a couple of weeks because I just couldn’t physically tolerate it, but almost as soon as the acute pain phase passed and settled into a dull ache, I was back at it again. On a professional level, I knew that continuing to work out on an injured Achilles tendon without seeing a physiotherapist first was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. After all, my fitness score wasn’t going to increase itself, you know? (Burned out brains often do stupid things, in case you were unaware.)

To this day, I still have pain in my Achilles tendon. It’s low-grade and manageable, but it’s there nonetheless. I didn’t seek out treatment for it until it was much too late, and likely have scar tissue around the tendon that will be there for the rest of my life.

I can’t blame Strava entirely, as pandemic-related stress obviously contributed to the injury as well, but would I have been a little less driven to work myself to the point of chronic Achilles tendinopathy without the existence of a fitness tracking app that’s focused primarily on showing off your fitness progress to your friends? Probably.

I wouldn’t be the first person, of course, who has used apps like Strava in unhealthy ways to chase social media-related dopamine hits. Sarah Giles, an emergency room physician, wrote a great piece a few years back on the risks associated with fitness apps, emphasizing that “fitness goals should be compassionate.”

Is it even possible to remain compassionate with yourself when you use social media-oriented fitness apps that encourage and reward comparison and competition? I’m not sure — certainly not after my own negative experiences with Strava.

On Ditching Trackers Entirely and Going Full Luddite

Funnily enough, it wasn’t really my growing disillusionment with fitness tracking or my injury that first got me thinking about tossing my Fitbit in the dumpster. As Fitbit users likely know, Google acquired Fitbit back in 2021.

Google made the following claim in the wake of the acquisition:

This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we’ve been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users’ privacy. We worked with global regulators on an approach which safeguards consumers' privacy expectations, including a series of binding commitments that confirm Fitbit users’ health and wellness data won't be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data.

That was all fine and dandy with me back when Fitbit accounts were mostly separate from Google’s ecosystem. But because Google just can’t resist doing Google Things, they announced earlier this year that Fitbit users will have until February 2, 2026 to migrate their Fitbit accounts over to Google accounts, or else.

Uh, no thanks, Google.

I started looking into a Fitbit replacement, and was frustrated to find that Big Daddy Google already owns most of the major affordable alternatives. My only real options were the Apple Watch, various Garmin smartwatches, or the Withings ScanWatch.

The more product research I did, though, the more I asked myself the following: do I actually need another fitness tracker? Has fitness tracking been a net benefit for me, or is it yet another example of the ways in which the tech world offers “solutions” to largely imagined problems to encourage device and app dependency?

I thought about all the money I’ve spent on Fitbits since 2014, the money I’ve spent on premium fitness tracking apps, the cringey fitness posts I made on Facebook for likes, the way I used my Fitbit stats to dwell on my work-related pandemic trauma, the injury I gave myself in the pursuit of increasing my pointless Strava fitness score, the anxiety I’d feel if I forgot to charge my Fitbit before a hike and the tracker died mid-activity … and something in me snapped.

For the first time in over a decade, I bought a goddamn Timex.

Photo by Stephanie Vee

It doesn’t have an accompanying app. It doesn’t buzz my wrist ten minutes before the hour with a happy little “reminder to move.” It doesn’t need to be recharged every two to three days. It won’t be rendered obsolete this time next year by a New & Improved, Bigger & Brighter™ Timex. It just tells time and glows in the dark. It’s glorious.

I hadn’t appreciated how much unnecessary background noise my Fitbit was creating until I got rid of it. The process of syncing it up with my phone, the meticulous pouring over of my sleep stats upon waking, the scrutiny of my step and workout stats before bed, the double-checking to make sure it was syncing properly with Strava, the dual buzzing from my phone and my wrist whenever I received a text message or phone call … these brief distractions all added up over the course of an average day, and I don’t miss them one bit.

I’m still keeping track of my workouts for my own accountability, but I’m doing so via Apple Notes — not via some data-hungry social media-oriented fitness app that will probably be gobbled up by Google at some point in the near future.

Closing Thoughts

In today’s increasingly sedentary world, I would never dissuade anyone from using a fitness tracker to increase motivation and build healthy habits. These devices, when used appropriately by healthy adults, can do (and have done) a lot of good.

That said, I think it’s important to recognize when using a fitness tracker becomes less about “fitness” and more about “signalling a lifestyle” (to quote Arthur Bouffard). I also think it’s important to remain cognizant and cautious about how much biometric data we hand over to tech companies that seldom have our best interests at heart.

Going full Luddite and abandoning fitness trackers for simple analogue watches might seem a little extreme, but it’s obviously a whole lot less extreme than using something like Fake My Run to … well, fake your run.

If you use (or previously used) wearable fitness trackers and have the time to leave a comment, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Do you still find fitness trackers useful, or have they lost their appeal? Why or why not? And to return to my earlier question, do you think it’s possible to have “compassionate” fitness goals when you’re using apps that encourage and reward public comparison and competition?

1. As always, GFY Elon. 🥳

2. … she said, as though this wasn’t often still the case in 2025.