Walking Cross Country - Tracking One Step At A Time

I began using a wearable fitness device called Fitbit in January 2010, the month after it came out and my first month of retirement.

Even with all of the hype today about wearables such as this, they are still used by only 1-in-10 Americans.  Half of Americans are aware of wearable devices of various types, not just for fitness.

I come from several generations of gadget people but was surprised that only a little more than a third of those who are early adopters of technology were aware of wearable fitness trackers today.

About 28% of Americans say they are likely to buy a wearable fitness device with half of those hoping to count calories and a third tracking the number of steps taken in a day.

Research shows that nearly 48% of Americans want to lose weight and have made that a goal for this year.  That plays nicely playing into the hands of users of devices such as Fitbit, because 47% walk long distances for health.

Unfortunately, 47% of weight loss seekers also enjoy baking cakes, pies, breads or desserts on a regular basis according to AudienceScan.  I wonder if this correlates to the 49% on a Pew survey two years ago who responded that they “keep track in their head.”

How’s that workin’ for ya?

I put that first Fitbit through the washing machine and waited a month or two to replace it so I don’t have a true running total of all of my activity tracked so far, but I’ve got it for the six years from April 2010 to now.

So far, I’ve walked about 2,900 miles or the distance between where we live in Durham, North Carolina and where my youngest sister and brother-in-law live in Mill Creek, Washington and then back up to the pass back through the Cascade Mountains.

But I only started walking religiously each morning a little more than a year and a half ago.

Every week now, on average, I walk a distance equivalent to walking from Witherspoon Rose Culture near the southwestern Durham County line near Chapel Hill to the northwestern Durham County line near Timberlake.  That’s about 25 miles on foot.

I’m typically an Apple guy when it comes to devices but after comparing the two, I upgraded to the Fitbit Surge for now instead of moving to the Apple Watch due out soon.

It includes some features the Apple Watch won’t have when it comes out next month at and it already pairs with my scale.

In part, it is also because I don’t like the fact that rather than innovating new products, Apple seems prone to either buy them up or run over businesses such as the entrepreneurs who founded Fitbit, which featuring about 40 partners has grown to provide about 70% of fitness wearables in use.

Eventually, once the bugs are worked out and it is clear I won’t lose any Fitbit compatibility, I suspect I might make the switch to the Apple Watch, but that remains to be seen.

Prior to when these fitness versions of a smartwatch came out, they had only 2% penetration with consumers.  Wearable fitness devices in general skew toward those between the age of 35 and 54, about half women.

Smartwatches on the other hand have skewed younger than that and predominately male.  I suspect Fitness Surge and Apple Watch are changing this profiles.

The Surge uniquely incorporates an “okay” GPS to map the routes you have taken but different than other Fitbits, it is better at tracking various exercises such as biking and weight training as well as yard work that may involve more exertion than walking.

It also does a great job of measuring heart rate and breaking it down into peak, cardio and fat burn zones.

If weight loss is a goal, as initially it was for me before dropping 30 lbs. to bring my Triglycerides back in line, take note of research showing that 60% of users for that reason lose more weight when pairing a fitness tracker with a weight loss app such as MyFitnessPal compared with when they didn’t use a tracker.

I wasn’t heavy per se but not in the best shape and my Tri’s were sky high.  They are formed by three fatty acids bound by a molecule of glycerol inside a fat cell and too large to flow through the membranes of the cell.

Typically, fat flows in and out of our cells constantly, but its fat that is stored like this that causes problems, even when we appear otherwise to be okay.

I’ve struggled to enjoy exercise during my life when it didn’t involve team sports or tennis but these devices and apps not only make it interesting but they make you aware of unproductive habits so you can break them.

No, nobody paid me to write this.  In fact, no one pays me to write any of these posts.  I’m just a fan of wearable fitness devices and related apps because they have made a big difference in my overall health.

Now if I could just find something to make traveling lunges seem fun!

Turning A Corner In November 1965

Earlier in my life, it was not uncommon for me to associate songs on the radio with a particular place and time.

On a snowy Idaho Monday in mid-November 1965, during our junior year in high school, we had just finished listening to the Unchained Melody by Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers as I turned my ‘57 Chevy onto the street where my newly steady girlfriend lived after school.

We had formed a bond at a school dance the Friday before that would last for more than four years including, but not enduring an extended absence as we turned 20 and giving me an understanding looking back of the song Unanswered Prayers.

As we slowly tooled down her street Yesterday by Paul McCartney then of The Beatles, began to play, which I believe was still #1 on the charts.  What can I say; we were schmaltzy Idaho Upper Snake River Mormon kids.

As a trivial aside, both songs were originally recorded as solos, although later sung live on tour with their singer’s respective groups.  The latter, with McCartney’s steel stringed acoustic guitar, was also the first time studio musicians were used on a Beatle’s, and maybe the last.

To bring the trivia full circle, McCartney now owns the rights to Unchained Melody, which my mother, when she was alive, was sure to remind me was a 1930s song, and one better known by my grandsons from the TV series, Glee.

As I pulled away after dropping off my girlfriend and heading to my job at a small, family-owned market, a news report came on the radio about a battle that had been raging in the central highland mountains of Vietnam called Ia Drang for the river that runs through it.

Less than four months earlier, there were only 75,000 troops in Vietnam but by year’s end there would be 189,000, and by the time I graduated the next spring, another 100,000 had been deployed.

Less than seven years older than me, my uncle was preparing less than 90 days later to be deployed to Vietnam as a newly minted fighter pilot with the 389th TFS where he would go on to fly an extraordinary 325 missions over North Vietnam through waves of enemy Migs and SAM missile defenses.

Unbeknownst to anyone in his family until I was given his personal effects, he had soon become highly decorated receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak leaf clusters, the Air Medal with 26 oak leaf clusters, and a Bronze Star.

But I had mixed feelings about the war on my way to work that November afternoon in 1965.  In the months prior, several Americans had immolated themselves to protest the war including a Jewish woman in her 80s who had survived the Nazis during WWII.

In the hallways at school though, me and handful of friends talked each morning with three of us planning to enlist if we were not drafted the next summer after registering when we turned 18.

But the sobering news that afternoon was about a regiment of 7th Cavalry troopers; (Custer’s unit at his Last Stand) which had been overrun by North Vietnamese troops but they had still managed to fight them off.

The newscasts were already masking the significance with gruesome body count comparisons.

The acclaimed 2002 movie about that engagement entitled We Were Soldiers left something out from the book upon which it was based, co-written by then General Hal Moore and a journalist who was there, Joe Galloway.

The book, acclaimed for its insights had been published in 1992 three years after I moved to Durham, North Carolina, where I would finish a lifelong career in community destination marketing.

The book is highly recommended although it is the haunting theme song from the movie, a lament written and sung by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie that has stayed in my memory.

The song is named Sgt. MacKenzie in honor of his great-grandfather of the Seaforth Highlanders, a unit in WWI, but the lament was inspired while the author was grieving the loss of his wife.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem that officials sending troops into Afghanistan and Iraq had read General Moore’s book.  If they had, they may have done things differently.

Coincidentally, in the terrorist implosion of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 was Rick Rescorla, a prominent part of the book who was left out of the movie.

I believe he was the trooper fleetingly depicted in the movie who after the battle found a bugle taken from a French unit massacred near there in the 1950s.

In the summer of 1966, while eagerly registering for the draft, I was advised that if I ever wanted to serve, I needed to have a football injury to my knee repaired.  Unfortunately, the advice was flawed.

With or without the surgery, the knee caused me to be rejected several different times as I repeated tried enlist over the next several years, using a variety of different avenues.

My last hope came while sitting in the student union cafeteria at Brigham Young University and watching the first draft lottery in December of 1969 revealing the order of draftees to be called the following year.

Signified by my birthday, July 8th, my number came up #13 out of 366, a portend causing some of my friends around me to gasp.

A year later, my uncle who had returned from three tours in Vietnam and having come to also oppose the war there was trying to talk sense into me.

When his superiors failed in their attempt to have his enlistment moved from reserve to regular Air Force, he was discharged, unable to fly for commercial airlines due to an injury to his ear drum when forced to eject during his first tour.

On June 7, 1966, he and another pilot had been on 15 minute ground alert status with a full load of napalm and 20mm cannon to support ground troops when needed, such as those that had been trapped 6 months earlier along the Ia Drang, a battle still raging.

They were scrambled, but declassified records show that while on takeoff, fire suddenly filled the left wing wheel well and the take-off was aborted with a crash landing beyond the end of the runway.

It wasn’t uncommon for fighter planes to take enemy fire during takeoff and landing.

Fire began to envelope the cockpit as the my uncle hurriedly tried to unbuckle the other pilot, who was trapped, just as the fire began to reach the plane’s ordinance causing fire fighters to withdraw leaving the shell shown in this essay.

Their plane may have been headed to the A Shau Valley, north of Ia Drang a similarly narrow funnel between mountain ranges for crucial supplies coming from the north down Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The battle there had been raging since that spring, when less than five months after parts of Hal Moore’s unit was overrun, a similar trap was sprung on Special Forces troops there.

From Idaho like my uncle and a former pilot for the Idaho National Guard then turned-regular Air Force, Bernard Fisher had volunteered to go to Vietnam in the summer of 1965 to fly in support of ground troops with his WWII era Skyraider, a single-seat propeller attack-plane with a distinctive engine sound I would often hear in Alaska when flown by hobbyists.

Fisher wasn’t the only pilot from Idaho over cloud-laden A Shau that day but in charge he repeatedly guided rescue helicopters in under the cloud cover along with other Skyraiders strafed the overrun fort below.

On the second day, he landed his plane under withering .50 cal. machine gun fire and pulled a downed pilot into his already cramped cockpit before taking off, receiving the Medal of Honor for his heroism.

But A Shau became emblematic for the war as a whole as did Ia Drang.

This all came back to mind as I drove through Idaho last August with my grandsons to a family lake-side retreat in the Northern Rockies and heard the news that Bernard Fisher had passed away at his home in Kuna.

Our stop for lunch along the Caribou Mountains not far from where my uncle grew up gave me an opportunity to tell his story as well as that of their great-grandfather and more than a dozen other ancestors who have served back to conflicts in the 1600s in this country.

Today, my uncle’s 389th TFS is also back in Idaho, an hour southeast of where Bernard Fisher died.

Sorting through ancestral documents and artifacts to organize them into histories for future generations gives me pause to reflect on what I was thinking on that November day in 1965.

Two friends who did make it into that war, one as a door-gunner on an Air Cav helicopter such as those pioneered by Moore, made it back safe, although it took years to fully resume their lives.

They, too, were soldiers once…and young.

Really, Pretty Centrist

I am a self-described moderate but people who know me say I can sound “pretty liberal.”

But a core of regressives in our state legislature as well as in the U.S Congress make moderates and even true conservatives sound liberal.

In truth, I get exasperated with a tendency by some liberals to sound as though they are always trying to absolve groups and individuals of personal accountability.

An example is a story last week on New Republic by Dana Goldstein entitled, Inexcusable Absences about some truancy laws that hold parents accountable.

My concern as I read the recent DOJ report on the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, is that as a society we have an obsession now with institutional accountability.  That blinds us to an even more significant underlying problems in neighborhoods and homes.

In fact, there is ample evidence that even the problems of some individuals within institutions can be traced back to the homes and neighborhoods where they were raised.

But if you get “bleeding heart” beginning of Goldstein’s story, she makes several very valid data-driven points about how we can institutionally deal better deal with truancy institutionally, but few to enlighten societal interventions at home.

Okay, am I sounding moderate enough now?

I may have dismissed the article too soon had I not read Goldstein’s phenomenal book recently entitled The Teacher Wars, a well-written and documented overview of 175 years of American education.

It was particularly enlightening when read, as I did, in tandem with the just published revision of The Libertarian Mind written by David Boaz.  There is actually more agreement than people who only judge them by their titles might think.

This country was founded by liberals and libertarians who did not see those outlooks as incompatible.

The Teacher Wars illustrates just how old, tired and ineffective the polices are that are now being rehashed by regressives elected to high office across the country.  The far right still fails to grasp that we are not all born equal.

The book also illustrates how misguided teacher unions have been to shield unengaged teachers from consequences.

The Libertarian Mind brought to mind a friend I see on occasion frequenting a restaurant in our neighborhood.  Get him started and he will spend all the time you have and more explaining how the federal government is to blame for the collapses that brought about the Great Recession.

He has a point but fails to grasp that it is the free market that fails to incorporate the full cost of its actions into a fully sustainable cycle, instead pushing what are called negative externalities off onto society.

Taking responsibility for consequences is also a theme in The Libertarian Mind whose adherents would probably agree with the right of Michael Brown’s parents to sue the Ferguson Police Department as a rightful consequence.

But it is much more complex when consequences are enforced on poor parenting or neglectful neighbors and landlords or on personal behavior regardless of circumstances.

This is also an area today’s liberals avoid, seeming instead to absolve consequences by viewing personal responsibility through the lens of victims of circumstance such as objecting to work requirements for safety net benefits even though those were required when the nets were first erected, ironically by liberals.

Everything seems to revolve around that pesky little issue of free will.  Libertarians seem to reject any other influence and liberals often seem to sweep away free will altogether.

The sticky wicket seems to be what is blameworthy.

But none of us has been held entirely responsible for each of our actions so criminalizing poor or inadequate parenting may not ensure personal accountability either and certainly doesn’t seem fair or consistent with any of the world’s spiritual cultures.

Consequentialism and Communitarianism, are to me at the opposite ends of a spectrum, one seeming to view the world only through individual responsibility and the other viewing responsibility as a result of community interactions rather than personal behavior.

So there too, I find myself clinging as a centrist, though as I get older liberals probably see me as “pretty conservative” and my more conservative friends see me as “pretty liberal.”

An Unsung Hero

There were only three of us who knew the untold story behind how Durham, North Carolina saved the Bulls.  Now only two of us remain and it is time for me to keep a promise.

Legends are a type of myth that combines fact and fiction in a way that re-harmonizes or re-narrates stories to contemporize them.  This is how villains become heroes and prodigal sons are redeemed.

This happened to the story of how Durham saved its beloved Bulls baseball club, even official accounts and with news stories often quoting people who were not yet in the room.

My purpose in fulfilling this promise to the late Chuck Grubb is not to set the legend straight.  The story as re-narrated is still worthy and the heroes as recast well deserving.

Chuck wanted a fragment of fingerprint left so that generations to come, when harmonizing is less important than it is today, will have some sense of just how close Durham was to losing the team and how the actions of a very few turned that around.

He asked me because I was there from the beginning and the only one of the three of us still living from that time who has remained rooted in Durham.

My role was extremely minor, even reactive. 

My chronicle begins when Chuck brought three of us together after a disheartening meeting took place on March 16. 1990.

That meeting had been less than 24 hours after voters had narrowly rejected a proposal intended to keep the soon-to-be new owner of the Bulls from moving the team from Downtown Durham to a location in Raleigh across the county line.

It had included a few others representing the city, county, chamber of commerce, the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) and one or two others.

It would be three more years before Downtown Durham Inc. would exist.

The meeting was short.  Everyone was exhausted, angry and out of ideas. The consensus of those who could bear to talk believed the cause was lost and wanted to give up.

I had been in Durham less than 9 months, recruited to jumpstart DCVB, Durham’s first official community marketing organization, an organization intended to become, in part, the guardian of sense of place including assets such as the Bulls.

While at the table, it was too soon to be able to fill that role.

Heavily spending to narrowly sway Durham voters against a stadium proposal, the new owner from Raleigh had commitments there to use prepared food tax revenues, newly granted by the state, but denied Durham, to build a new home for the Bulls.

Soon he would complete an option to buy the Bulls.

As purely a business venture, it was reasonable even though a college student survey project of fans had shown that even fans from Raleigh would be less likely to attend without the authentic, warehouse setting of the old Bulls ballpark in Durham.

Chuck would say I called him.  I thought it was the other way around but we talked later that day and agreed to meet.  I brought along one of my new stakeholders who had been calling me repeatedly about what our fledgling organization could do and encouraging me not to give up.

Ray Hobbs, who after all these years still keeps in touch from time to time had returned to Durham as a hotelier six months after I arrived.  He had traveled here first as a kid when his father was undergoing treatment at Duke.

Ray had previously managed another hotel in Durham in the mid-1980s as Miles Wolfe was resurrecting the Bulls and simultaneously Minor League Baseball overall.

But when I arrived in 1989, Ray was managing a hotel down in Raleigh, while trying to make his way back to Durham.  There he had got to know another hotelier named Hobbs, Jim, but no relation.

When Chuck and I met that day with Ray, I was still far too green to know my way around or what to do, but Ray offered one last “Hail Mary.”

He volunteered to check with Raleigh hoteliers to see how they felt about the new prepared food tax being used to poach tourism assets from other communities.

He found it didn’t set well at all but then as now any real organizational clout of hotels had migrated from local and state to the national level.

But soon the “Hobbs boys” as he calls them connected with T. Jerry Williams who then-headed the powerful North Carolina Restaurant Association and whose ascent had paved the way for Raleigh and Charlotte and their respective counties to have the new food tax.

The “Hobbs boys,” with DCVB cranking out form letters for hoteliers and restaurateurs in both Durham and Raleigh to use, began a letter writing campaign to legislators protesting misuse of the tax to poach the Bulls, while serious threats of a lawsuit were made.

The joint publicity campaign worked.  Raleigh officials, fearful the food tax would be repealed, withdrew the stadium funding.

It is our fault that this part of the narrative is now lost.

Once a turning point is achieved and a change of course seems imminent, anyone behind the scenes in a controversy is usually on pins and needles to ensure redemption of those involved.

The owner of the Bulls now jokingly tells audiences that he was the first to call and offer an olive branch to Durham officials because they were saying such nasty things in public about him.

I recall that Chuck made that call.  But what matters most is that these two individuals became friends and began to work together on a new stadium proposal in Durham resulting in the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (DBAP.)

Ray soon moved on to manage hotels in other communities, eventually heading a chain in the Caribbean and becoming a sought after consultant.

A few years later, the owner of the Bulls called me down to where he was sitting along the first base line during a game with his then-corporate counsel and quizzed me about who owned the old, abandoned Lucky Strike Factory across the street.

Today, DBAP is part of over $100 million in public infrastructure invested in the district encompassing it, while the Bull’s owner has leveraged even more than that amount including invaluable historic tax credits to create a showcase of adaptive reuse that the owner calls the American Tobacco Complex surrounded by newer office buildings and soon a new hotel.

Oh, and the historic Durham Athletic Park that had been home to the Bulls on the other side of downtown since the 1930s and favored by voters who had turned down a new stadium. It has been nicely renovated and serves as home to the NCCU Eagles.

To illustrate how far people will go to re-harmonize a story, a few years ago, until corrected, a person speaking to a group of Minor League Officials went so far as to intimate that the Bulls had built the DBAP to save Durham, completely inverting what actually took place.

This is how legends evolve.

Legends are a form of folklore.  They are ways people make meaning of their lives.  It is a natural form of healing and redemption that stories such as this are re-narrated and harmonized over time.

Heroes are evolved over time to reflect changing cultural values.

Dr. Lynnette Porter, author of several books about heroes, reminds us that King Arthur is an example of a “literary hero who has been reconstructed over time.”  Others such as Galadriel, a royal elf in The Lord of the Rings, worked behind the scenes for world salvation.

So it is equally important that future generations understand complexities and never forget the crucial but quiet, unsung contributions of heroic individuals at pivotal points in a community’s history.

In time, I suspect Ray Hobb’s contribution to Durham’s story will be rewoven back into the narrative of how Durham saved the Bulls.

The Resiliency of Today’s Student Traveler

Bacchanalia grabs all of the headlines about spring break for colleges giving a distorted view of student travel, especially as it has evolved over the past decade.

According to analysis of various studies published recently in a white paper by Skift and StudentUniverse, student travel now represents “fully one-fifth of all International arrivals” in the travel sector and they go “far beyond the backpack-and-party crowd.”

In fact, history and culture rank as more important than parties for both males and females.  Of relief to parents of young daughters, several other experiences including local food rank higher than parties and nightlife.

Significantly, by more than three to one, females would have still traveled even without those social gatherings.

I found it interesting that 60% of this travel is female, and families pick up just over a third of the cost.  The students come from more than 4,100 public and private colleges.

Nothing replaces experience in the workforce during college but it is interesting that 97% of these student travelers felt the trip improved their self-confidence, and 99% believed the travel provided insights to personal strengths and weaknesses.

Nearly 9-in-10 of the student travelers surveyed felt the trip helped them get a job.

I had just turned 19 when I took my first cross country plane trip from my native Rockies in 1967.  I wasn’t ready yet, physically or emotionally, to make the most of my trip to Western Europe.

My daughter studied there for several months in high school and returned during her college years.

Students today are even more prepared for these experiences than either me or even my daughter were.

Of course, mobile devices are a game-changer.  My daughter, who is now the single mother of two grandsons and a chief privacy and ethics officer, often marvels with me at what it would have been like to have that access while she was growing up.

By 2020, the market value of this type of travel will reach $320 billion with U.S. destinations being equal beneficiaries of those inbound to this country.

Important to note is that student travelers are more than three times as likely to use various Internet devices for in-destination information as they are local hosts.

Today’s student travelers are also more resilient when it comes to “terrorism, political and social unrest, disease and natural disasters” requiring helicopter parents to lighten up.