When I was racing bikes badly (or at least with immense mediocrity, heh), I relied on a Garmin Edge 500 GPS-tracking device to keep track of speed, time, and so forth while riding and to log my workouts.

These days, I spend most of my time dancing somewhat less badly than I raced bikes, and I don’t ride anywhere near as much. The Edge 500 isn’t equipped for tracking things like dance, aerials, and housework, so while I’ll probably keep the Edge 500, I’ve bought a refurbished first-generation Garmin Vívofit fitness tracker.

I don’t really need it, but I like data, and I’m curious. I wasn’t, however, willing to commit $100+ to a fancy new-model fitness tracker until I’ve tried using one for a while — not least because I’m not great about wearing things on my wrists.

The Vívofit refurb was fairly inexpensive and pairs with my existing ANT heart-rate monitor strap (which is comfy), so I figured I’d start with it and work from there. If I like it a lot and decide I want something a little fancier, I’ll pass this one along to Denis.

Thus far, the only thing the firs-gen Vívofit doesn’t have that I’d like to have is a built-in watch. Oh, so it turns out that the Vívofit does have a watch; it just wasn’t activated until I synced it. Derp. So, now I also have a watch. Yeah, my phone knows what time it is, but sometimes it’s a pain in the neck to dig the phone out of my pocket or whatevs. It turns out that the folks who invented the wrist watch knew what they were about, eh?

It also knows the date, which is nice for those of us (like me) who live in Golden Retriever Time and tend to be a bit vague about dates.

Anyway, thus far, I’m not finding the wristband annoying, which is really kind of the most important thing, since a fitness tracker I won’t wear is worthless. The small one fits fine and doesn’t get in the way when I’m typing.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Vívofit thinks of ballet classes 😛