This past weekend I got to help some amazing people as they attempted the crazy Zumbro 100 in a blizzard. One of those people was Susan Donnelly, who is a beast in this sport, completing over one hundred, 100 mile races. She recently posted a blog about running and turning off your technology to listen to your body. This was actually very timely for me, as I had just recently made some changes to the way that I use some of my running technology.

I’ve been GPS tracking my runs since very early on in my running career. In the early days of 2010 I used a phone with a GPS app on it to keep track of my runs, as this was the easiest and cheapest way to do GPS tracking. As a quick aside, tech people will get a kick out of the fact that my first GPS tracking phone was a Palm Pre, completely with sliding physical keyboard. Eventually though, I decided to move up to something that had better tracking capabilities, and didn’t require physically handling a phone mid-run to see where I was at.

I purchased a Garmin GPS watch and from that point on started using it to keep track of every (outdoor) run that I went on. As the years have gone by I’ve upgraded a couple times, and each time has given me a more advanced device on my wrist. Every new watch has all kinds of fields, trackers, HR monitors, and calculated measurements by which to analyze my run, on the fly.

On more than one occasion I’ve found myself looking at my wrist, mid-run to see what my current pace is. Sometimes it pushes me to work harder, but many times it doesn’t do more than just annoy me. Therefore, I’ve decided to take advantage of all of the customization options on new watches that allow you to change what your seeing on every screen.

My current running setting is now set up with only one field on the main screen… total distance. I can press some buttons to go down to different screens and see other data, but by default, all I see is how far I’ve gone. That means that I’m less tempted to look down at my watch to tell me what to do, and instead simply listen to my body. There’s no current pace, or lap pace, to cloud my judgement. I just go with what my body feels like it’s capable of, and only worry about how far I’ve gone.

I could also create another screen that is just total elapsed time if I wanted to do more duration training, but for now the distance field is all I need. None of this means I’m less of a data geek. When I return home I upload my runs and dive in to the data as quickly as I can. I still like to see everything, but I find that I run better when I’m not distracted.

The beauty of modern watches is that I can very easily switch over to some screens that give me more data if I’m doing a very specific training routine that requires it. Overall though, I’ve found that running by feel is the best for me to keep me running strong and injury free.