If you scroll the logbook far enough you'll notice my flying picks up around the time I got my private pilot certificate. The hundred-ish hours before that are real, they just aren't in here. I didn't use ForeFlight for most of training, which means there are no KML tracks to import, no auto-generated entries, no map. The flights exist in a paper logbook and in my head.

This is on purpose, and if you're starting flight training I'd push you to do the same thing. Learn to read a sectional. Plan a cross-country with a plotter and an E6B at the kitchen table. Fold the chart so the next leg is on top. Write a nav log by hand, in pencil, with checkpoints and ground speeds and fuel burns, and then sit in the airplane and watch reality disagree with it. That disagreement is the thing you're actually learning to fly.

ForeFlight is excellent. It's also a very competent crutch. The moment you let it pick your route, set up your radios, and read your chart for you, you've outsourced the part of flying that makes a pilot. The mistake is letting the tool do the thinking before you've done it yourself. Once you have, the tool becomes what it's supposed to be: a faster way to do something you already know how to do.

So the hours are in the count, but the flights aren't here. The book they're in has coffee stains on it, which feels about right.