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.
I’m dealing with a form of sciatica down my leg that is triggered from standing up. I spent the majority of my adult life avoiding sitting, and now it’s sitting that gives me relief. I’m also dealing with golfer’s elbow, which is easy to aggravate in the gym, but doesn’t usually bother me in my day-to-day activities.
I know the golfer’s elbow has lingered because I use it a bit too much in my workouts and I don’t always stop when it bugs me… in other words, I don’t really know my limits for what I can do with my elbow, until I do too much.
My leg is keeping me humble. I’m really being careful and that’s because I’m tired of this pain lingering. I’ve stopped walking on the treadmill and I ride a low seated stationary bike for my cardio, I am avoiding leg exercises for now, and I’m choosing to sit every chance I get. And of course I’m actually doing the physio exercises I’ve been given… every day!
Still, I’ve now gone to a doctor and I have painkillers to help me reduce the leg pain. My challenge now is to still understand my limits and not try to do too much just because the pain isn’t as bad. It’s hard to do this, despite the fact that I need to be smart and patient. I’m just stubborn, and always feel like limits need to be pushed all the time. I need to remember that there is only a small gap between stubborn and stupid.
I’m going to physiotherapy. I’m going to massage therapy. I’m doing my stretches and exercises. And I’m still dealing with leg pain that gets triggered from standing. Until a week ago I could just sit for 5 minutes and the pain would fade. I could walk on the treadmill or up/downhill, and even run, and felt no pain… but after 3-5 minutes standing in the shower, shaving & brushing my teeth, or making food, the pain returned.
For the last week and a half, the pain has crept into activities where I’m mobile and moving, and then has been slow to subside, even when I sit.
So, I’ll keep doing my stretches, keep going to physio and massage, and even seek more medical help. What I’m also going to do is give my legs more rest. I’ve been pushing hard, I’ve seen amazing gains… but my body is telling me that it needs a break. I’m going to go easy on my legs, and give this issue some time to heal.
I’ve written about finding balance many times before, and I think that in our busy lives finding balance of time is one of the most challenging things to figure out. Between work, family, leisure, and health, there is never enough time in the day. Today, I’m thinking about a different kind of balance, physical balance.
A few weeks ago on one of my Coquitlam Crunch walks I slipped on a small icy section. It was careless because it was my second trip past this area, and I had noticed the ice the first time, then walked right through that section blissfully unaware the second time. I took most of the fall on my hand, my wrist was a bit swollen and very sore for a couple days, and only recently I haven’t noticed it at all. I was lucky not to have broken my wrist.
As we get older, falls become one of the biggest threats to our wellbeing. I have to wonder if I was 15 years younger, would that ice have caused me to fall, or would I have been able to regain my balance? Also, would my situational awareness have been sharper, since I should have already been aware that section was slippery?
Either way, I fell, and had the potential to do a lot more damage than I did. A few months ago I was regularly working on my balance. One thing I was doing was balancing on one leg with my eyes closed. I was getting better at it and then asked both my daughters to try and they had no issues doing it longer than I could. This is something that definitely decreases with age, and I want to add improving my balance back to my stretching routine.
My dad passed away at 79. At that time he was already shuffling around, unable to go up or down stairs without holding the rail and going one step at a time. My in-laws are in their 90’s and were far more mobile than my dad was at 79, but I can also see their struggles with balance now.
Physical balance is so critical to a healthy lifespan, and it’s something that is easy to take for granted until you no longer have it. And falls can be a quick way to hinder how well you can balance in the future, or at the very least they can disrupt your healthy routines with an injury. Yes, strength trading helps a lot, as does cardio training… but I think exercising specifically to maintain balance is something I need to pay a bit more attention to.
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.
I just joined a gym and they had a great promotion on 5 sessions with a personal trainer, so I took advantage of the deal. Today I met my trainer, but not until after I’d already done the Coquitlam Crunch (3x up, once down – 9 kilometres with 3/4 of the time going up hill).
So I wasn’t exactly fresh and ready, but I was excited to get started.
My trainer asked what I wanted to work on. I definitely didn’t want to do legs after the crunch, and my buddy and I did a hard chest and back workout yesterday, so I chose shoulders. He had me doing some exercises with 2.5lb weights, and some face pulls that I’d normally do with 60 or 80lbs, but he had me working with 20lbs doing a technique I’d never tried before.
Here’s the thing, I definitely got a good shoulder workout in. I don’t need to go heavy, I just needed to focus on technique and to work my muscles in a way that I’m really not used to. It was hard to get a full set in with these light weights and both my form and technique definitely faltered as I progressed.
It’s a nice, humbling reminder that it’s better to go light, and do it right, than it is to slap more weight on and have crappy technique. I’d say, ‘lesson learned’, but I know that’s actually just an observation rather than a shift in practice. It’s going to take a few more sessions for me to really understand how to push my body properly with lighter weight rather than muscling through workouts sloppily, with heavier weights.
I bought myself a new watch. This is the first time that I’m going to be regularly wearing a watch in over 20 years. I chose the Garmin Venu 4, for a few reasons, mostly related to health tracking. I would have chosen the Apple Watch, but I want sleep data and my family members all have the Apple Watch and end up having to charge it every night. The Venu 4 has a 12 day battery life, and even if I use it on full brightness, I’m sure it will last well over a week, which is something I really wanted.
Right now I feel like I bought a race car and I’m only driving it in a school zone. This watch has so many capabilities that I’m not yet using. That’s because I got it late yesterday afternoon and I had a dinner function to go to, so I really haven’t had time to play with it and set up all the fancy bells and whistles it comes with.
So far what I like is that I can easily check my heart rate. This is an important feature for me because I think that I’m not getting myself into the heart rate zone that I want to be in when I’m on the treadmill. Now I’ll be able to monitor this. Also, the sleep data from last night suggests that most the night I was in a light sleep and I woke up quite a lot. This is something I really want to monitor. I already tend to get only 7 hours sleep a night, I’m hoping I can figure out a way to use that time more effectively, sleeping more deeply. Monitoring my sleep data will help me on that journey.
I’ll be learning more about how to fully take advantage of all the features this watch has over the next few workouts and evenings. My only disappointment so far is that it isn’t compatible with Apple Music, because Apple doesn’t share music with non-Apple products. But this isn’t a huge deal since I keep my phone with me anyway. Other than that, I’m pretty excited to see what this watch can do, and how I’m going to use it to track my health living journey.
My workouts have stagnated a bit recently. I’m doing the minimum, but the good news is that I’m still showing up. Yesterday I did my first interval training in about 3 or 4 weeks. I want to do it weekly, but I haven’t made it part of my routine yet.
The reason I haven’t made interval training part of my regular schedule yet is embarrassingly simple: It’s really hard. The purpose of doing intervals is to maintain and improve my Max VO2 levels. To increase Max VO2, I need to not only do intervals, but do them at a very physically taxing level. That’s hard to do when just showing up is a challenge for me right now. But yesterday was a day off work and so I used the day as an opportunity to get an interval workout in.
I did a warm-up then eight 1-minute sprints. My sets are actually 1:15 hard and 1:10 easy, because it takes about 13 seconds to get my treadmill from my easy recovery speed to full sprint and I want the sprint to be a full minute. It’s not fun, but it’s much easier than the Norwegian Protocol which is four 4-minute sprints with 3-minute rest intervals. And I think that’s going to be my ticket to get back into regular intervals. When a task is hard to do, break it down into something more manageable. I can talk myself into 1-minute sprints even when I’m not feeling fully motivated… four 4-minute sprints feels like torture right now.
Through all this I’ve still been very consistent with my zone 2 training, but I think even that has not been ideal. I’m not sure how effective I’ve been because I haven’t been tracking my heart rate and so I’m not certain if I’m getting and staying in the zone. That’s changing this month, when I buy myself a Garmond watch, then I’ll really be able to track my cardio workout progress. I’m hoping the extra data will help motivate me to push myself.
When consistently doing hard things, maintaining motivation is important. I’ve become a master at showing up. My dedication to my workout habit is unwavering. Last year I did 326 workouts, and I’m on schedule to be around that total this year. I know how to show up! But if I were to rank myself on an intensity scale, this year would be much lower than last year. So my focus is to finish the year hard and strong. And I’m fortunate that I’ll have the tools to help track this. It benefits no one to lie to myself about how hard I’m working, and so the extra data the watch will give me will both inform me, and keep me honest about my progress.
