Resolutions and Runkeeper

 New Year's resolutions were made to be ignored so I never made any. 

On the other hand, I have a dog needs walking. As all the Management courses tell you, "What you don't  measure, you can't manage." (Which is true to a point, but any good manager in real life will also tell you, "Not everything that can be measured is important, while things that cannot be measured are sometimes very important." But I digress.)

How far and how long I walk the dog can be measured. For many years I used an app on my phone called Runkeeper. It uses GPS to track where and how long you walked, ran, jogged, depending what you set it to. Also measures change in altitude over distance. 

I walked Lucky to the dog park closest to us a few days ago. He was bored as there were no other dogs there so we started for home. I hate retracing steps so I tried to go a different way and ended up walking south along the edge of three lanes of traffic going north. Most of my shortcuts end up like this. Two hours walking and 4 km measured on Google maps. Next time I'll go back the way I came.

I reinstalled Runkeeper on my phone today and  the three of us walked almost to the Lawson Pool. Tanya loves to swim and will likely walk there herself so she wanted to know how far it was from our house. Took almost an hour, there and back, as Lucky spent a great deal of time sniffing and marking. Do you know how long it takes to walk two blocks with trees every ten meters?

This is some of what Runkeeper displays after a walk:

Friday we will walk to the dog park again. The weather has been so great for walking since Christmas with temps around -10C, no wind and bright sunshine. It is perfect winter weather for outdoor activities.