Goh Ling Yong : My Phone Thinks I'm Still a Runner - Goh Ling Yong
My phone buzzes on the kitchen counter, screen lighting up with a chipper, unwanted memory. “On This Day: A Look Back at Your Run in Marina Bay!” Below the text is a photo of me from four years ago, gaunt and grinning, sweat-soaked hair plastered to my forehead. I’m holding a finisher’s medal the size of a saucer, the Singapore skyline a blurry, triumphant backdrop. My face in the photo is one I barely recognize — all sharp angles and sun-weathered certainty.
The man looking at the phone screen now is softer, a stranger to the 5 a.m. alarms and the obsessive tracking of heart rate zones. I’m nursing a cup of coffee, my left knee issuing its familiar, low-grade complaint about the morning’s humidity. I swipe the notification away. It’s the digital equivalent of swatting a fly, a minor annoyance that carries a disproportionate sting.
The notification vanishes, but the ghost remains. My phone, this sleek black rectangle that knows more about me than my own mother, is convinced I am still that man. It refuses to believe that the runner is gone.
The Ghost in the Machine
To be fair to the algorithm, the runner left behind a mountain of data. For a decade, he was my primary identity. He was the one who woke in the pre-dawn dark, the silence of the city broken only by the rhythmic slap of his shoes on pavement. He was the one who knew the exact distance from his front door to the base of the Benjamin Sheares Bridge, the precise number of steps it took to crest the top, and the exhilarating burn of the descent.
My life was measured in splits and segments. My weekends were dictated by long runs, my social life curated around race schedules. I spoke a language of PRs, tempo runs, and negative splits. My digital footprint was a monument to this obsession. Every run was logged on Strava, every race photo uploaded to Facebook, every gear purchase meticulously researched via blogs and YouTube reviews. I fed the machine thousands of data points, each one a confirmation: This is who I am. This is what I do.
The algorithm learned my habits with terrifying precision. It knew I bought a new pair of Asics every 400 miles. It knew I searched for foam rolling techniques on Tuesday evenings after my track workouts. It knew I was more likely to click on an ad for electrolyte gels than one for a new watch. It built a perfect, high-fidelity model of me. Or rather, of him. The runner.
And that model was, for a long time, accurate. It served me well, suggesting new routes, connecting me with other runners, and feeding me a steady diet of content that reinforced my chosen identity. It was a symbiotic relationship. I provided the data, and the machine reflected my own self-image back at me, polished and affirmed. I was a runner, and my phone was my most diligent training partner.
The Slow Fade
The end wasn’t a dramatic, explosive event. There was no single, catastrophic injury, no tearful retirement speech. It was a slow fade, a gradual erosion. A nagging ache in my knee that doctors shrugged at, calling it “runner’s knee” with an infuriating casualness. It was a new job with longer hours that made the 5 a.m. starts feel less like noble discipline and more like self-flagellation.
First, I gave up the track workouts. Then the weekend long runs became shorter, then sporadic. The marathon I’d registered for was deferred, then forgotten. The running shoes, once placed reverently by the door, were relegated to the back of the closet, their bright colors slowly dulling under a fine layer of dust.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to quit. It was more like a long, drawn-out ceasefire. I told myself it was a break. I told myself I’d get back to it when my knee felt better, when the project at work was finished, when life calmed down. But life never really calms down. It just changes shape. The space that running had occupied was slowly filled by other things: late nights at the office, lazy weekend mornings with a book, long walks where the goal was not distance or speed, but simply to arrive at a good coffee shop.
The runner didn’t die. He just quietly packed his bags and left, leaving his digital ghost to haunt the premises.
Memories, Curated by a Stranger
The haunting is relentless and comes in a thousand different forms. It’s the Google Photos widget on my home screen, cheerfully displaying a picture of me crossing a finish line, my arms raised in victory, while I’m sitting in a traffic jam on the PIE, feeling decidedly un-victorious.
It’s the targeted ads that follow me across the internet. “The New Carbon-Plated Super Shoe Is Here!” my Instagram feed screams. “Shave Minutes Off Your Marathon Time!” I’m not trying to shave minutes off my marathon time; I’m trying to decide what to order for dinner. The dissonance is jarring. It feels like getting mail for a person who used to live at your address, a person you once knew intimately but no longer speak to.
YouTube is the worst offender. My recommended videos are a schizophrenic mix of my past and present selves. A tutorial on advanced spreadsheet functions sits next to a video titled “5 Drills to Improve Your Running Form.” A review of a new sci-fi novel is wedged between a race recap of the Berlin Marathon and an interview with Eliud Kipchoge.
Every notification, every recommendation, is a small, unexpected confrontation. It’s a tap on the shoulder from a former self, asking, “Remember me? Remember when we were faster, leaner, more disciplined? What happened to us?” The algorithm, in its cold, binary logic, sees my past behavior as a predictor of future intent. It cannot comprehend the quiet grief of letting something go. It has no category for burnout, for changing priorities, for a body that no longer cooperates. It only knows patterns. And my most dominant pattern is a man who runs.
The Unsubscribe Button for the Soul
So I began the quiet labor of teaching the algorithm how to forget. It’s a slow and tedious process, like trying to erase a ghost with an eyedropper.
It started with the apps. I deleted Strava, my digital shrine of sweat and miles. The app asked me if I was sure. It felt less like a confirmation pop-up and more like an existential question. I deleted Nike Run Club. I unsubscribed from the running subreddits.
Then came the social media curation. I started unfollowing the professional runners and gear reviewers. I muted friends who were still deep in that world, their constant posts of sunrise runs and race bibs feeling like small betrayals. On Instagram, when an ad for a GPS watch appeared, I would meticulously tap the three little dots. Hide Ad. Why are you hiding this ad? It’s not relevant.
“Not relevant.” The phrase is so simple, so clinical. Yet each time I tap it, it feels like a profound act of self-definition. I am telling the machine, and by extension, myself, that this is no longer me. This identity is no longer relevant to my life.
I went deep into my Google account settings, a digital labyrinth of ad personalization and activity controls. I paused my location history so it would stop recognizing when I was near my old running routes. I deleted years of search history: “best marathon training plans,” “how to treat plantar fasciitis,” “Singapore running race calendar 2019.” Each click of the delete button was a small eulogy for the man who needed that information.
This is the strange, hidden work of modern life. We spend years building a digital self, carefully curating the image we project. But we rarely consider the work required to dismantle it when we change. There is no simple “I’m a different person now” button. You have to prove it, one data point at a time, patiently explaining to a dispassionate machine that the person it thinks you are no longer exists.
This morning, another notification arrived. This time, from my calendar. “5th Anniversary: Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon.” I looked at it for a long moment. I remembered the heat, the humidity, the wall I hit at kilometer 35. I remembered the delirious joy of crossing the finish line. I felt a familiar pang, a faint echo of the man who could do that, who wanted to do that.
But the pang was different this time. It was less a sting of loss and more a fond, distant memory, like looking at an old school photograph. That was me, then. This is me, now.
I swiped the notification away. Later, on my walk to the train station, my phone buzzed with an ad for compression socks. I smiled, a real, unforced smile. I tapped the three dots. Not relevant.
The ghost is still here, and maybe it always will be. But it’s quieter now. The haunting has become a conversation, a gentle negotiation between the man I was and the man I am becoming. The algorithm is a slow learner, but so am I. And in this quiet, ongoing labor of teaching it to forget, I am also teaching myself how to move on.
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