I Walked Up to Doc Holliday's Grave. Here Is Everything That Happened After.

Doc Holliday is buried somewhere in Linwood Cemetery, above Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Nobody knows where exactly. The headstone up there marks the general area and nothing more precise, because he was buried a pauper in 1887 and the plot was never written down.

To get to it you walk south out of town, cross the river, follow Bennett Avenue to a trailhead, then climb about a third of a mile up loose rock with no shade. Roughly 300 feet of gain. Base elevation is 5,760 feet, so if you flew in from Florida that morning you will notice.

I did the walk with my wife. Hotel to hotel it came out around 2.6 miles. Then I sat down and told Claude to log it.

What happened after that is the reason I am writing this.

Two hours, and I did not know it

I thought the walk took an hour. When I said so, the numbers disagreed with me.

Apple Health had the session at about two hours of continuous movement. 5,440 steps, 289 active calories, average heart rate of 116, with the peak hour sitting at 125. The 5pm and 6pm blocks are nearly all of it. You can see the climb in the heart rate before you can see it anywhere else.

Turns out I had been describing the outbound leg only. Hotel Colorado up to the headstone was the 45 to 60 minutes I remembered. The trip back down, plus the mile across town, was the rest, and I had thrown it out of my own account because downhill does not feel like exercise.

My memory of a walk I had finished ninety minutes earlier was off by half. That is the entire argument for logging things you are sure you remember.

The watch and the map disagreed

Recorded distance came in at 2.02 miles. The route I mapped from actual coordinates said 2.6.

Both numbers are honest. Apple turns steps into distance using a stride length calibrated on flat ground, and going up a 16 percent grade your stride gets shorter. The step count is fine. The multiplier is wrong. 5,440 steps supports the longer figure.

Small discrepancy, and no fitness app is ever going to raise it with you, because reconciling two sources that disagree is a judgment call and judgment does not fit in a form field.

There was no workout to read

If I had started a workout on my watch, none of the above would have been necessary. HealthKit stores a route with outdoor workouts, a series of location samples with altitude attached, and it hands you cumulative ascent as workout metadata without any math. Distance and elevation would have been exact and free.

I did not start a workout. I was on vacation, walking to a grave, not training. So what existed was background step and distance data, hourly buckets, nothing labeled, nothing bounded. Finding the session meant charting steps by hour and looking for the shape of a walk in the noise.

That is the normal case for anything you do on a trip. You do not press start. You just go, and then later you wish you had a record.

Nothing to fill in

I already have a system for gym work. I wrote about tracking every workout by talking to my phone, and I eventually turned it into an iPhone app, because the gym has a shape. Push day, pull day, known machines, known weights, same room every time.

A walk in an unfamiliar town has no shape. There is no exercise to pick off a list and no plan it belongs to. This is where every fitness app I have used turns into friction, because it wants me to translate what I did into its vocabulary before it will accept the entry.

So nothing got filled in. I described the walk the way a person describes a walk, by naming where it started and where it ended. Four locations went out to Google Places for coordinates. Route distance and elevation gain came from those coordinates. Apple Health supplied the effort. My fitness brain in BlackOps, which is a folder of markdown files with one file per exercise, got checked for an existing outdoor walk note. There wasn't one, so one got made.

Then it committed to my Obsidian vault on GitHub. Three commits by the time the duration was right, which is a fair public record of me being wrong twice and it costing nothing to fix.

The card came out on brand

I wanted something to share, so my brand settings got pulled off the site directly. Accent color, dark surface colors, border tone, type scale.

What came out is an elevation profile of the route with the grave at the apex and the numbers underneath. Flat through town, a hard spike, a long easy fall back down. The shape carries the story better than any single statistic would, which is why it is the center of the image instead of a big number in a circle.

The graphic matches the site because the brand is a thing that can be read by a machine, sitting in the same system as everything else.

What I actually own

This is the part I care about.

The log of that walk is a markdown file in a git repository I control. I can open it in a text editor, search it from a terminal, or copy it to another machine where it still works. In ten years, after whatever I am using now has been acquired and shut down, that file will still open.

Set that against the usual arrangement. Your steps, your heart rate, your routes, your weights, all of it sitting in a database you do not administer, shaped into a schema you never agreed to, exportable in a format that satisfies a regulation and helps nobody. I have made this argument about publishing platforms before. It applies harder to your own body than it does to your writing.

The next morning I did press start

The next morning we hiked Hanging Lake, up in Glenwood Canyon. It is 1.2 miles each way with something north of a thousand feet of gain, most of it rock stairs. Hardest hike I have ever done. It took me four and a half hours of moving time to cover 3.17 miles, which tells you more about the trail than any adjective would.

And I did press start. The watch caught all of it. Duration, distance, 695 active calories, a peak heart rate of 147 in the ten o'clock hour when the stairs were worst. Clean capture, and none of the reconciliation the day before had needed.

Then it sat in Apple Health for five days and I never thought about it again.

That is worth sitting with. The walk I did not record got written down, because I happened to be somewhere I could have a conversation about it. The hardest thing I have ever hiked got nothing, because afterward I got in a car and drove and the moment passed.

Apple solved capture years ago. What nobody solved is the five days in the middle, where a recording sits in a database waiting for you to care enough to go get it, in a format that will never leave that database on its own.

One useful thing came out of finally pulling it. Flights Climbed logged 14.6 for that hike, which works out to something like 146 feet against a real gain of more than a thousand. So that field is worthless on a trail, and anything I build later has to read the workout's own elevation data or fall back to published trail numbers.

Five days later

It would be dishonest to leave this out. This post sat too.

I logged the walk the evening I did it. The hike got nothing at all. And the draft you are reading, the one arguing that the space between a recording and a file you own is the part nobody has solved, sat unfinished while I flew home and went back to work.

I came back to it today, pulled the hike into the brain, and published it. None of that delay was a tooling problem. I just had to come back.

Doc Holliday's real grave is unmarked because nobody bothered to write it down. I find that funnier than I probably should.

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