I don't use health tracking or sports apps anymore. No Strava, no watch nagging me about recovery time, no weekly summary telling me how I compare to last week. This isn't a purity thing, and I'm not claiming the apps are evil. I just noticed that they were slowly changing why I run.

What I actually wanted

My reasons for running are simple, and I wrote them down so I wouldn't forget:

• Stay fit, in the boring, long-term, still-able-to-cycle-up-a-hill-at-sixty sense.
• Be outside.
• Reach villages by running there, and running back. This is my favourite one. Pick a village on the map that feels too far, build up to it, and then one day stand in front of its church, a bit ridiculous and very happy, and turn around.

Notice what's not on the list: pace, heart rate zones, segments, kudos, rankings.

What the app asked instead

Strava is beautifully designed. That's the problem. It's designed to answer one question really well: how did you do compared to…? Compared to last week, compared to your best, compared to everybody who ran this same stretch of road.

I'm very sensitive to that question. After every run, before I'd even stopped breathing hard, the app handed me a few numbers: pace, speed, elapsed time. And once you've seen a number, you can't unsee it.

Then there are the other people. Somebody I follow ran twice the distance I did, at a pace I could only hold for a few minutes. Not because they were showing off, but because that's just what the feed is: a list of other people being faster or further than you, updated all day.

None of that was what I was looking for. But it worked on me anyway.

The colleague on Monday

Let me be honest about the mechanism, because it's the embarrassing part.Lets say I have a colleague who runs. Of course I want to be faster than them. Of course I want to casually mention on Monday that I did a long run on Sunday, we humans we like to compare.

That's a very human motivation, and I don't think it's evil. But it's not one of my values. And it can quietly overrule them.

I don't want to injure myself to feel good for a minute at the coffee machine. That's the opposite of staying fit.

Optimising the fun out of it

Around the same time, I kept seeing the same joke online: rich thirty-somethings who pick up a hobby, like baking, cycling or sewing, and immediately optimise it. Sourdough hydration spreadsheets. Power meters. Fabric purchased in bulk and a fully tuned workflow. Within a month they're stressed, have a lot of equipment and don't enjoy the thing anymore.

The reason they started was to relax, to make something with their hands, to be out on the road. And then they optimised away the exact thing they'd come for.

I laughed, mostly out of recognition.

What I do now

It's not complicated, and it's not very high-tech:

• I run without a watch and without my phone tracking anything.
• I choose a village, run there, and run back. If I can do it, I did it. That's the whole result.
• I stop when I'm tired, not when a number says so.

Some of this means giving up genuinely nice things. I don't get a tidy history of every run. I can't see a graph of improvement. I'm sure I'm leaving some fitness on the table. That's fine. I'm trading it for a run that's only about the run.

This isn't a rule for anybody else

If tracking motivates you, keep doing it. For plenty of people the data is the fun, and the social side is the reason they show up at all. I'm not saying the apps are bad.

On Sunday I'm going to run to a village that's still a little too far. I won't know my pace. On Monday, if my colleague asks, I’ll talk about the church.