Technology and Sports Don't Blend (But Nowadays Sports Are Exploited to Sell/Promote Useless - or Sometimes Even Harmful - "Tech")
Two decades ago I still competed a bit
HAVING just expressed my most sincere disdain for the "Olympics"® (it got worse in 2008 when the "Olympics"® got co-opted by Microsoft to push Silverlight; we wrote a lot about it back then), I thought I'd mention the use of Free software in fitness. I still care about fitness, but I've lost some of my fitness since turning ~25 (it's me on the left). That's aging. Nobody can "skip" aging.
My wife and I work out from home. This morning, for instance, we used Invidious to follow workout routines on a big screen while exercising on mattresses. Invidious is of course dependent on people uploading clips to YouTube, which is proprietary, but the 'catalogue' of videos in other video-sharing sites is a lot poorer (and of lower quality, on average).
When I need a stopwatch I may still use a Palm PDA "app" (it's Free software and very advanced) and my workout routines are still in PalmOS (which is actually proprietary, but that goes over 20 years back! Old habits!). Diet and shopping lists are all managed in Kate (KDE) and on physical pieces of paper. Yesterday I opened 2 more bags of protein shake (so there are now about 7 different flavours to choose from, in tandem) and when out for a run I carry no electronics at all, not even a Portable Music Player. I'd rather listen to the sound of birds than loud music on tiny in-ear headphones (never made to optimise sound quality; they were all along the gimmick du jour and so-called 'music' got optimised for them, not vice versa). Safety is improved that way (e.g. being alerted about approaching dangers like someone shouting or a car honking). I know people (not far from me, even a Ph.D. student) who died while crossing the road with headphones on.
Exercise at its very core isn't about tech, either proprietary or Free/libre. The body simply doesn't care what gadget or gadgets you have on you. The body develops based on the exercise done, not gadgetry. It's a mirage or fool's errand to believe the more one spends (as in, money!) on exercise, the better the exercise will be. It's difficult to "buy" health or "purchase" exercise. You need to go out and actually do it! Nike has associated "Just Do It!" with consumerism (as in, just buy our overpriced sweatshop-made shit!).
In more recent years I became aware of - if not disturbed by - people who carry around tracking devices of all sorts, either for weights workouts - e.g. counting sets and repetitions - or for running (tracking their movements, location, so-called 'progress'). The data is either passively uploaded to "the cloud" or sent there by virtue of queries, e.g. polling for information about location, not by GPS but other means. Some weight exercise machines now come with computers attached to them. Where I used to work out (a "proper" gym) they added those in 2015. At least those were not network-attached. They were 'offline'.
Sport will cease to be fun the moment it involves severe privacy violations and sale of one's data to so-called "data brokers". Some gullible people go out of their way to help companies gather data not only about exercise routines but even sleep. Big Brother never sleeps, does it?
The bottom line is, the body will develop and endurance will improve irrespective of how much one spends (wastes) on devices. In the medical context, some tracking can be justified (detecting danger/s), but why extrapolate safety-critical applications to something recreational? That never made sense. Nowadays they even put motion trackers on footballers' chest for "statistics"; in practice it only worsens their underlying performance. It cannot possibly benefit anybody but the industry (broadcasting). Keep racism out of football and keep tech out of footballers' bodies, please. █
