Somewhere around kilometer one, every single run now, the same thing happens. I look down to check my pace, and Strava has just… stopped. Frozen. Not crashed exactly, more like it’s taking a breather. By the time it catches back up, it’s trying to make up for lost data, so kilometer two shows some impossible pace that would have me qualifying for Boston (the marathon, not the shoe). Kilometer three finally sorts itself out. The whole run, it works out fine on average. In the moment, it’s maddening.

My Apple Watch SE is two and a half years old, which in smartwatch years is somewhere around “should probably see a doctor.” This is actually only my second Apple Watch ever. I’ve been wearing one since basically the technology existed, which either makes me an early adopter or just a guy who’s been quietly loyal to a wrist computer for the better part of a decade. And here’s the thing about being fully in the Apple ecosystem that long: when one piece of it starts to go, you feel it everywhere. This isn’t a “my watch is old” problem so much as a “I have quietly outsourced an enormous amount of trust to a piece of technology strapped to my wrist” problem. I didn’t sign up to also be my own IT department mid-run.

There’s something particularly annoying about technology failing you during the one activity that’s supposed to be simple. Running is, at its core, a very old and very stupid activity. You put one foot in front of the other, repeatedly, until you’ve gone far enough. It doesn’t need innovation. And yet here I am, three kilometers into a run, doing mental math to figure out if I actually ran a 5:40 split or if my watch just had a moment.

I’ve mentioned before that I lean on tech more than I probably should for this whole comeback, watch, Strava, AirPods, and the app I use to obsessively track sleep I’m not getting enough of. Most of the time it’s genuinely useful. It’s just that “most of the time” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the times it isn’t useful tend to be exactly when I need it to just work. I broke down the whole running tech stack a while back, and this watch has been the backbone of it the entire time.

So, begrudgingly: it might be time for watch number three. Not because I need new features, I use maybe four of them, but because two and a half years of daily GPS runs and however many thousand notifications has apparently taken its toll, the same way it would on a person. Fitting, honestly, for a blog about a guy whose body is also two and a half years further into a comeback than his motivation would like to admit.