My doctor estimated that if he took people off the street, 50 percent of them would have this impingement bone structure. But they may not have pain or injury because they weren't doing extreme exercise. Historically, hockey players suffered from these kinds of tears with their extreme, quick lateral moves; now dancers, runners, and yogis like Lady Gaga are tearing their labra, too. We're forcing our hips into positions like pigeon pose that don't play well with the underlying architecture of our bodies.

Lady Gaga’s tear was reportedly the size of a quarter. Thankfully mine was much smaller, requiring an hour-and-a-half long arthroscopic surgery conducted through three small holes in my thigh. The surgeon reattached my labrum with two dissolvable laces, and then shaved down the impinging bones on both the femur and the socket.

To prepare for surgery, I had to take everything off: nail polish removed, all jewelry left at home, including my wedding rings and a helix earring that required pliers to take out. Still, I was so in the habit of wearing my Fitbit that even on the day of surgery I clipped it to my sports bra.

After the surgery, I wasn't sure why I kept it on at first. I was instructed to get lots of rest that first week, so the activity tracker should have lost its utility. But I had made Fitbit so much a part of my routine over the last year, so much an extension of my awareness of distance, of quantified movement through space, that I was now looking to it as a tool for recovery.

Fitbit

Some self-trackers stop tracking after they've solved a problem or introduced a new habit. I'm the type of tracker who sticks with tracking things long after they've taught me something useful. Once it becomes a part of my routine I stay with it. I've had my Fitbit for more than a year, I haven't ever lost it, and I only dropped it in the toilet once.

As part of my research on the quantified self community, I logged all my runs and yoga sessions, diet, sleep, and even gratitude. Ironically, the things I was doing to maintain my fitness and health ended up being the things that wore down my hip and pushed my body beyond its limits.

I have a record of all the ways I wore away at my soft tissue, in those 18 hours and 32 minutes of yoga I did in the month leading up to my wedding, in those averaged 8-minute-mile jogs that started out with characteristically inconsistent 7:31-minute first mile splits. I see those record-breaking days wandering Paris and Venice. I see where I tried and failed to train for a half-marathon. I see where I injured myself, stopped running, and started physical therapy. These moments are marked by step counts and workouts, but the narrative that explains the numbers is overlayed like a personal journal.

Looking back at my running logs, Strava reminds me, "Push yourself harder in 2014." That's the opposite of what I need right now. But that's the underlying logic guiding the design of these fitness tracking systems.