I think a lot of it has to do with things it the rest of our lives. We watch TV shows based on time and how long they last. We have instriment pods in our cars, boats and aircraft. We are expected to do X amount of work in X amount of hours. Just as we use gages to tell if our machines are running correctly we use gages to see if our body is working correctly. It may not be important except if you are ever explaining to someone about your riding, running, swimming whatever. We play games and we keep score.

Many of us can ride, recoard and view the countryside at the same time. And most of us can forget about the instruments while riding if we want to. But think about it, if someone askes how long it took you to do a century even if you don't use a computer we have time started and time finished. People aren't normally satisfied with, "it took all day" but they will understand if you say, it took 6.5 hours. We are at a stage where our machines keep the numbers for us. Even if we aren't interested in what they say they have the information if we want it.

Can we go overboard? I wouldn't know, I have to look at my spread sheet for the last two years and see.