Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
We choose a path that doesn’t take us where we want to go… a path to nowhere.
Endless scrolling on social media. Binge-watching shows instead of pursuing hobbies. Saying yes to everything and stretching ourselves too thin. Procrastinating on big goals by tackling tiny, irrelevant tasks. Staying in our comfort zones, avoiding new skills that scare us. Skipping exercise or eating junk for quick fixes. Remaining friends with negative people who drain our energy. Buying stuff to feel better, but still feeling empty after our purchases, or buying on impulse because it’s easy, and the items aren’t too expensive.
But the costs are real. The path isn’t forward. These are all paths to nowhere.
It’s that time of year again where I go to my big tracking calendar and add up my totals for the year.
Once again I was very consistent with my workouts and meditation, and I’ve yet again maintained my daily writing for another year. I’ll break a few things down as I reflect on the year.
Workouts: After taking a look at my 2024 calendar, I realize that I haven’t missed 2 days in a row in over 2 years. This year I was a little less strict in my definition of a workout, sometimes only doing 15 minutes of cardio, and sometimes not doing both weights and cardio, but still committing to a workout 326/365 days in 2025.
In my 2024 post I said regarding one of two goals, “Gain 7-8 pounds of muscle… Now I fluctuate around 167-169 pounds and would like to bring that to 175 pounds.”
For the last couple weeks I’ve been bouncing around 173-175 but I hit 178 a couple months ago and I’ll get back there after the holiday break. So, I totally achieved this goal, and couldn’t be happier. For 2026 I hope to be in the 183-185 range. I think this is a huge challenge, my body seems to like the 174-176 range and I’ll have to work more on a consistent diet rather than just focusing on weights and training.
Meditation: This is something I need to improve. While statistically I did well with frequency of meditations, about 85-90% of these were done when walking on my treadmill. Although I listened to a guided meditation, I was almost always distracted and allowed my monkey brain to wander instead of truly meditating.
I’m actually not going to try to change this at all in the next 6 months, but once I retire I’ll attempt to meditate for longer, and be more dedicated to meditation. This will include a more formal setup and a setting other than on the treadmill. For now I’ll stick with the status quo.
Daily-Ink: I’ll continue to write every single day for 2026. This started in July 2019, and I have no plans to change this in the short term.
Creativity: This was a failed goal but I’m still happy to track it. I wanted this to increase, but it decreased. Essentially, the only thing I tracked this year was meetings with my uncle where we discuss our Book of Codes project and just as importantly, life, the universe, and everything. Again, I’ll have new goals after retirement, but for now I’m in maintenance mode and just want to keep going as-is.
So, my main goals this year are calorie tracking and building muscle mass. I only want to get to 185lbs, this isn’t a plan to keep gaining weight after that. I actually like the weight I’m at right now, but at 58 with a not-so-great back, I realize that I’m one injury away from having to take a few months off and potentially dropping 8-10 pounds. Hopefully such an incident is a couple decades away, but even if it’s only 5 years away I’m keenly aware that I will have a much harder time regaining weight in my older years. So if I can sit at 185lbs as my normal weight, I know that I likely won’t drop below 175… which again is a weight I’m quite happy to be at.
185lbs by the end of 2026 is my goal, and to get there I will focus on hypertrophy in the gym and a higher protein and calorie intake than I have normally consumed.
Fitness, meditation, and writing are things I no longer need to track to ensure that I’m on track. For this reason, I think I might be retiring my large calendar and stickers. I recently got a Garmin watch with Lifestyle Tracking and I’ll still record these daily, but it’s time to put an end to the calendar. It has served me well but having joined a gym, I no longer go to my basement every day and tracking this month has been less diligent since I could go a full week without adding stickers. That said, if you are starting a new goal, I can’t recommend this strategy enough.
2026 is going to be a great year of continued progress… Gradual at first, but picking up speed after my mid-year retirement.
We had just completed our weekly training as we prepare to ‘Everest the Crunch’ (walking up the Coquitlam Crunch 37 times in 48 hours, to climb the equivalent height of Mount Everest), when Dave shared the following quote on Instagram, along with a photo of us and of a sensational sunrise behind Mount Baker from this morning.
“Refresh, renew, and re-emerge! Find your Everest, go for it, and crush it!”
This is the time of year when millions of people start New Year’s resolutions, yet statistics say that 92% of these will fail. If you want to be in the 8% success rate, take a moment to really consider what your goal is that you are going to attain with your resolution. Is it something that you can hold on to? Is it big enough to be a challenge, desirable enough to keep your drive, and yet still attainable enough that you won’t be discouraged if progress is slower than expected?
My buddy Dave has been on an amazing fitness journey, and has lost a bunch of weight while also building muscle. I’ve been on a journey to add healthy weight, lowering my percent body fat, while gaining muscle. At the start of this year we joked that we were going to meet in the middle, with his weight going down and mine going up.
Before heading to work this morning we went to the gym and worked out together. Then we took turns stepping on the scale. I weighed over a pound more than him! We did it, we met in the middle. Well, almost in the middle… Dave covered a bit more of the gap. Still, this wasn’t a real goal, just lofty target we put out into the universe. Now we are there. Next steps are for both of us to make gains together.
It’s hard to stick to healthy routines over the summer. It takes a lot more effort than when you have everything dialled in and a schedule to keep. That said, I’m thrilled about how I’ve taken care of myself over the summer. I haven’t just been in maintenance mode. I’ve actually stayed right on top of things and continued with my goals, albeit in tiny increments.
But tiny increments in the right direction still means I’m going in the right direction. The thing to remember is that while the gains are small and hard to see, they are only hard to see when looking short term. I’ve gained muscle this year, and I’ve simultaneously reduced my body fat percentage.
Sure when I compare myself to the start of summer, or even a couple months before that, the gains are small. But when I compare myself to 2 years ago, or better yet when I started my fitness goals 5-and-a-half years ago, the gains are significant!
It’s easy to get frustrated with how small gains can be in the short term, but fitness and wellbeing are lifelong goals and as such gains should be looked at through a longer lens… and I have to say that things are going, looking, and feeling great!
We didn’t know on a cold, wet, and dark Friday in January of 2021 that we would make this a usual thing. Two friends, feeling isolated with covid restrictions decided to do the Coquitlam Crunch so that we could meet outdoors when indoor meetings were restricted to your family circle. Now, over 4 and a half years later, we’ve completed our 190th Crunch together, averaging more than 40 a year.
We were about 50 in when we decided that 200 would be a great goal to achieve before we retired, and now that is all but guaranteed. Did we fathom this when we had done just one Crunch? No. We didn’t even know if we’d go again. But sure enough we kept going, with a goal of 40 a year to match the amount of school weeks in the year.
Now, I can’t think of anything I’ve been more dedicated to (besides my wife of course). We do everything we can to not to miss a week. We usually go out on Saturdays, but we’ll squeeze in a Thursday after school if one of us is away on the weekend.
Imagine being just over a year into a routine and deciding on a 5-year goal… then sticking to it. Sounds challenging, but it’s something I look forward to every week. I’d never have spent so much time with my buddy, Dave, if we hadn’t made this a goal, and an expectation. And there are more goals to come… stay tuned.
Real change only happens when the pain of doing something new is less than the pain of avoiding the new thing. I was talking to my buddy, Dave, after our 178th Coquitlam Crunch today and we spoke about the discipline and work that we’ve put into fitness, good eating habits, and our social-emotional wellbeing. It comes down to the fact that habits are easier to maintain than motivation, and showing up matters more than any other factor.
It sounds so cliche, but the most important workout is the one you don’t want to do… but still do. It’s a scheduled workout day and you have zero motivation… do a workout anyway. Your gas tank is empty and you can’t imagine doing your workout routine… go to the gym anyway and do a 20 minute walk in the treadmill.
Probably more than 50% of the times that you drag your ass to the gym, not wanting to go, you’ll end up doing more than you expected you would do. But guess what? The other times when you don’t do more, when you just barely do the minimum… these are the workouts that really matter. You showed up! You kept the habit going. You made the next attempt to go to the gym easier. “If I can get to the gym feeling the way I did yesterday, I can definitely get to the gym today!”
“My advice,” Dave said, “would be just show up for the first 100 days. Don’t expect to see changes, don’t even look in the mirror. The first 100 days are about making workouts something you never miss, or monitoring calories and developing good eating habits.”
Essentially, the first 100 days are really hard, and they matter the most. I said that, ‘Real change only happens when the pain of doing something new is less than the pain of avoiding the new thing.’ Whatever your new habit is, reduce the pain of doing it by making the desired goal mandatory.
You want to go to the gym 5 days a week? For the first 100 days there are no excuses, nothing is allowed to make you miss. You went away for the weekend and didn’t work out? You go to the gym every day from Monday to Friday. Exhausted and don’t want to go to the gym on Thursday? Too bad, you already missed the weekend, and attendance is non-negotiable.
Will that Thursday workout be a good one? Probably not. But it will likely be more than you thought you had in you, and it was the most important workout of the week. You got there. You kept the streak going. You aren’t someone who skips out, you don’t make excuses, you maintain your habits. You are a regular who would rather feel the pain of a workout than the pain of letting yourself down.
Just show up for the first 100 days. After the habit is established, then you can look at losses and gains. Then you can reduce fat, add muscle, increase flexibility or endurance… or just feel good about yourself because you have developed a great habit that you find easier and easier to maintain.
I’ve been trying to put on some weight. Five pounds to be exact. I’m actually at my long term goal weight, but I want to be this weight 10 years from now… and at age 57 I recognize that it’s going to be hard to both gain and maintain healthy weight in the next decade.
So, a few months back I decided that I’d shoot for another 5 pounds of muscle by the end of this year. And for these past few months I’ve moved from floating just between 5-6 pounds from my goal weight to floating between 4-5 pounds from my goal weight. Not a significant change.
However, I need to remember my journey here. I have spent almost 6 and a half years working on my current fitness journey. I’ve seen incremental changes through that journey. I dropped over 27 pounds of unwanted weight and have then added 12 good pounds. I’ve had less back pain (other than a herniated disk in my neck, unrelated to my training or my usual lower back pain). My back still aches daily, but my days of actual pain have diminished considerably. And I’m at least as strong as I was in my 20’s and stronger (and more flexible) in most areas.
And no, I have not really seen any gains in the last few months, but that’s ok. I feel them coming. I know I’m on the verge of another small jump. The only problem is the gains now are too small to see. But they are here. I just bench pressed my personal best since I was in teacher’s college back in ‘97-‘98, and I’ve been pushing my leg workouts more than I ever have in the past.
Small gains are being made. More gains are around the corner. And if I stay focused on doing my best instead of worrying about my current progress, I’m sure I’ll hit, and maybe even surpass, my goal by the end of the year.
I came across this quote, but I’m struggling to find the original source.
Working out will make you feel weak, when it’s actually making you stronger. Learning new things will make you feel dumb, when it’s actually making you smarter. Investing in yourself will make you feel broke, when it’s actually making you rich. Facing your fears will make you feel terrified, when it’s actually making you braver. Never hold yourself back.
Strive to be better tomorrow than you were today. Thank yourself later.
If you want to be hard on yourself, do so for not trying when it’s hard. Be tough on yourself when procrastination wins and you skip an attempt to improve. But no matter how small the gains may appear, no matter how minimal yourattempt to be better seems successful, that is the journey you want to be on.
James Clear said,
Goals are for people who care about winning once.
Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.
You don’tset the right systems in place when you are looking for instant gratificationor results. You show up… Every. Single. Day… And you take solace in knowing that what you do today will pay dividends for days, months, and years ahead.Understanding this helps to relieve the stress of not seeing long term positive results, by trusting in the seemingly insignificantimprovements today will bring.
Today is fleeting, there are many tomorrows, many days that future you will appreciate the efforts you put in today. The original quote above ended with, “Strive to be better tomorrow than you were today. Thank yourself later.” I think that Iwouldadd, ‘Also remember to thank yourself today… you’re doing great!’
It’s fascinating how much of weight training is mental. I’m simultaneously an athlete who can push my body to a level that surprises me, and the loafer who can’t eke out one more rep despite still having gas left in my gas tank. One minute I’m forcing myself to get one more weighted pull-up done, straining with everything I’ve got to get my head above the bar. A few minutes later I’m quitting on weighted step-ups, because mentally, rather than physically, I’m done.
What I’ve mastered is showing up. What I’m working on now is maximizing my gains. That doesn’t mean being stupid, lifting too heavy, and hurting myself. What it does mean is making my sets count. Making my reps count. Making my workouts efficient and effective.
How does this look when I’ve mentally quit on a set too soon? Maybe it means a 4th set. Maybe it means a lighter weight and more reps. Maybe it means giving myself permission to let that one set go and come back stronger the next set… or if need be the next workout. Awareness is the first step. The next step is being intentional about what I do next.
If I’m going to see the gains I plan to have in the next year, I’ve got to push a little harder than I have been. Pushing in a smart way is going to get me to my goals… injury free.
