Garmin watch

This morning I put my husband’s Garmin running watch (with its GPS tracker) to a different use. I wore it for one hour around the house while I had breakfast and did housework. It was an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of the technology we own.

From about 9 am to 10 am I prepared and ate my breakfast, did a load of laundry, vacuumed four rooms, dusted a little, and stripped the sheets off my bed. Plus I got the mail and looked in my car for something. This is the path I walked:

Housework path via satellite

The Garmin and Google Earth seem to be off a little from each other.

Here’s the data:

Garmin housework data

In one hour of basic housework I walked 0.20 miles and burned 90 Calories. The elevation spikes are from when I went up in the attic to get the vacuum and when I lifted a box of stuff into an upper cabinet.

It’s a shame that I only went a fifth of a mile in doing all of that. Maybe the data would reflect that this was good exercise if I had worn the heart rate monitor, but my husband wears it every time he runs, and I don’t want to clean the sweat off of it for this.

Perhaps if I do this again, I’ll try it on one of those days when I have to walk around putting lots of stuff away and decluttering. Maybe then I can get the entire rectangular footprint of my house to be colored in red.

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