Greetings all,
Welcome to September and the last quarter of 2018. Time flies, yadda, yadda, yadda.
I’m a fan and user of the Apple Watch for fitness tracking and what Apple occasional does is create various badges and awards in its Activity tracking app to help users stay motivated to exercise. I’m also an admin of Facebook’s Apple Watch Fitness Fans Group and walking is one of the many workouts I log as an exercise in the app. On ! Sept, they issued the National Parks achievement for any user that walks or runs for a total of 50 mins, minimum, and logs it as a workout. I took them up on the challenge, got up early and went for said walk at 7 am that morning.
It was a cool morning, perfect for a walk during that time of day. It included an uphill walk (don’t know of the elevation got recorded by the watch and/or phone) part of the way, as well as through two paths that joined adjacent streets. The workout data as well as the achievement award, are shown below.
As I had just started the round trip, another walker on the other side of the street approached me. We gave each other the obligatory good morning wave, and kept stepping. What I noticed is, instead of treading on a perfectly constructed sidewalk (as I was doing), he chose to walk in the street. What I *never* understood is why people do this when a sidewalk is available.
Granted, I’ve seen a group of people do this, but I only think this happens because a sidewalk is too narrow to accomodate discussion between all involved, so to spread out by the curve in the street makes it easier for all to talk and hear each other, instead of pretty much walking in single file. I can’t see applying that logic to a single person walking.
I have come to one deductive reason, which may seem cockamamie but here goes: People who do this may have grown up in rural areas where sidewalks were not prevalent, only roads, so they are forced to do so and are used to it. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Thanks for the read.
Fresh!
PS: For you fans of the band, The Time, get the blog title 😉
References:
1. Apple Pay and Apple Watch help customers celebrate America’s national parks.