Front Page · Wellness Desk
Man's Fitness Age Ruled 52 By His Watch, 39 At The Barbecue
He turned off leaderboard sharing before breakfast. He is still telling people his resting heart rate is basically an athlete's.
The watch lights up at six in the morning, before anything else is awake. It reads: Fitness Age, 52 — he is thirty-nine. He does not get out of bed until the screen goes black again.
My resting heart rate is basically an athlete's.
The first thing he does most mornings is turn off leaderboard sharing with his running club. Nobody there needs to see this number. He turns it back on for a stretch every so often, then off again.
"My resting heart rate is basically an athlete's," he told his brother-in-law at a barbecue. He held his paper plate at chest height the whole time, as if it might block the number. His brother-in-law nodded and asked if he'd seen a doctor about anything else. He changed the subject to the meat.
Before sunrise on Tuesdays he walks backwards up the hill behind his house, convinced it resets the baseline. He does it in his underwear, because getting dressed would wake his wife with questions. Going backwards downhill afterwards is worse. Last week his stomach turned on the way down and he was sick into the neighbours' hedge. He rinsed his mouth at their garden tap and kept walking backwards. Stopping would not have counted.
His employer's wellness programme buys the same feed. It ranks staff by recovery score. The leaderboard is tied to an annual bonus nobody remembers signing up for. His rank has dropped low enough to lose it. HR calls this "a temporary dip, likely lifestyle-related." It has also booked him a call with a wellness coach he did not request.
He wrote to the programme's support desk, asking why the hill wasn't working. The reply came within a day and did not apologise. His baseline, it turned out, had gone up, not down. His Fitness Age was now worse than the one on the nightstand.
His health insurer buys the same data as an add-on service. It has raised his premium under a line called "risk profile update." It has also added one note to his file: "monitor."
This newspaper ran its own step-count leaderboard for one week last spring. It was switched off after the editor's Fitness Age came back at sixty-one. Nobody has brought it up since. We would like to keep it that way.