“If It Isn't on Strava, Did It Happen?” or the Naked Wrist
What would it mean to unplug ourselves from the world — just for a day, a week, even a month?
Around the time I quit my corporate IT career in 2011 and moved to the United States, "Offline Days" became a thing. A form of digital detox: disconnect completely from smartphones, computers, social media, the internet. The goal was to cut stress, ditch the doomscrolling, and reconnect with the physical world.
Doesn't that sound like exactly the kind of movement that should have caught on among runners? And yet, at precisely that moment, Strava launched: 2009, the same year the "Sabbath" traditions and campaigns like the Global Day of Unplugging, organised by the nonprofit Reboot, were getting going. One side of the culture was trying to switch off. The other had just found a much better way to switch on.
Strava grew exponentially, peaking somewhere between 2012 and 2015, segments plotted across the globe, people chasing crowns and local-legend status on stretches of road they used to just run. I wrote about the digi-appearing body >>here: what it means to experience body-mind-world when the body gets reduced to a data point.
Now, in 2026, I've come across yet another pre-published study. This one by Lev and Landgren[1], "A Pilot Study on Technological Disengagement and Identity Disruption Among Distance Runners." A little dramatic a title, maybe, for the process it describes. But we genuinely know very little about what happens when we unplug ourselves. The two researchers, both amateur long-distance runners, laid off their smartwatches and went cold turkey. Long story short: they found freedom. Free to listen to their bodies and their surroundings, liberated from performance metrics. But also scared, uncertain of their own abilities and achievements, vulnerable without the quiet certainty of smart help.
Plenty of studies have looked at this quantitatively, how performance changes with and without a wearable. Far fewer have asked the qualitative question: what are the sociocultural and psychological stakes here? How do runners see themselves through a data-driven lens, and what happens when that lens - or that access - disappears?
Running has become a socially constructed world, maybe even a digitally enhanced one. Its own lingua franca: "pain is part of the game," local-legend crowns, segment heroes; shapes how the community recognises itself as a subculture in its own right, one that's grown enormously over the past two decades. It feels like everyone runs at least one marathon a year now, if not ten, even though only around 0.2% of the world's population ever finishes one in a lifetime. Funny what a "new" digital age can do to perception.
I'll be upfront: the researchers are once again their own test subjects, perhaps nobody else was willing to give up the watch. Everything for research; I respect that kind of commitment. And from experience, I agree with what they found: an experienced runner already knows their pace, distance, and perceived exertion without a device telling them so. It's liberating. It creates room to simply stop and admire the scenery. Isn't that meant to be the whole point of being outside in the first place?
I also miss the days of pen and paper. Without a smartwatch and without the flood of data points that comes with one, I use my own wit to design a workout, or to jot down what actually matters to me, not to Garmin. Maybe it's a note about the beauty of a tree or a trail, something no GPS will ever tell you. Long before anyone strapped a GPS chip to my wrist, this is how I found my way through unmarked trails in the Eifel, and later through the Mëllerdall and the Albanian backcountry, more on that in Running Off the Map >>here.
Before the digital age there were mechanical stopwatches, too, the kind that never ran out of battery, you just wound them up and you were ready for another round. And it's remarkable, if not entirely surprising, how close you can get at judging pace and distance with no electronic help at all. Sometimes more precisely than a GPS signal that's just dropped out somewhere deep in the forest.
Still, I agree with Lev and Landgren that you can genuinely miss having that companion. Something, or is it already embodied as someone? that completes the self-defined picture of a run with "exact" data, that makes the effort feel valid and official because the watch tells you your VO2 max just went up (never mind that it's barely accurate without an actual lactate test). Wouldn't it be nicer if we simply decided for ourselves whether it was a good run? Or, if it wasn't, were just glad we'd got out the door at all? That's the kind of unforced ease I wrote about in the eu-appearance piece >>here: the body simply being, rather than performing.
Running without a watch can feel a bit like a phantom limb: reaching for something that isn't there. Or maybe it's the tan line, quietly mourning the watch that should be sitting on top of it. The researchers even took a selfie of their "naked wrist"; apparently it looked so foreign to them that the shot needed retaking. Proof that the wearable has become part of their identity, not just their kit? It's the same conspicuous-through-absence effect that keeps showing up: the thing you never notice while it's working suddenly becomes impossible to ignore the moment it's gone.
A pilot study in 2026, when the Global Day of Unplugging dates back to 2009. That's a remarkably long adjustment period, don't you think? Is there really any way of turning back the clock to pen and pencil? I'm committed to trying it myself, a proper field study of one. Just not before I close out the year and see whether I've banked my 3,000 km on Strava. Because: “If it isn't on Strava, it didn't happen.”
Written by Ingo@Lozania-Lifestyle.de
[1] Lev, A., & Landgren, J. (2026). Running Unplugged: A Pilot Study on Technological Disengagement and Identity Disruption Among Distance Runners. American Behavioral Scientist, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642261421300