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.
Last year I wanted to do one Max VO2 training session a week, but I really did it only every 2-3 weeks. This year I’m committed. My activity of choice right now is 8 one-minute sprint intervals. My interval timer is actually set to 1:15 high intensity followed by 1:10 low intensity. The reason for the additional time is that it takes about 13 seconds to get the treadmill from my low intensity walk, at a 3.4 pace, to my high intensity pace starting at 8.6 and progressing to 9.4 on the final one (I skip 8.7 for those that are math inclined).
I thought I’d share the stats from my watch for the last 3 runs, and then I can see how I compare closer to the end of the year.
January 11, 2025
January 14, 2025
January 20, 2025
I’m actually not trending well, with my average and overall heart rate going up, but fluctuations are to be expected and that’s why I decided to share the last 3. There are two big challenges ahead. The one I have control over is dedicating to doing this at least once a week. The one I have less control over is seeing how quickly I can get my heart rate to recover and if I can decrease my overall peak heart rate doing the same activity… this challenge should be achieved just from the commitment to do this weekly.
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.
Today I learned a good lesson. I’m in pretty good shape, but almost all of my cardio training has been under an hour. The only exception has been training to Everest The Crunch, (climb a local power line hike 37 times in two days this coming August, to exceed the height of Mt Everest). Two weeks ago we did 4 times up and ended with one trip down the crunch.
This week we did one more trip up for a total of 5 up then one down.
It was a gorgeous day. We got started by organizing cars and help driving at the top, then headed down to the base and started walking up around 7:45am. At that time the sun wasn’t out yet and I was dressed warmly, but not appropriately. This was my first mistake. I was wearing heavy, fluffy long underwear under water resistant track pants, and a cotton shirt under a hoody and a rain shell.
By the end of the second trip up the hill I was a hot mess. My long johns and cotton shirt were soaking wet. I felt either too warm or chilled from the sweat, there was no happy medium.
My second mistake, and the bigger of the two, was that I didn’t eat enough. I brought no snacks, and only had a protein shake about 45 minutes before starting. There is a stairs section of the crunch that always gets my heart rate up pretty high, and on both the fourth and fifth trip up the hill my heart rate didn’t really go down after the stairs. Basically, I was running on empty.
My buddy, Dave, who is doing this adventure with me (it was actually his idea), appropriately lectured me. And, I’ll be wearing quick dry layers and bringing more sustenance than half a water bottle of flavoured water the next time we are doing 3 (and more) hours of exercise. Lessons learned.
The good news is that 5 trips up still felt completely doable, and I’ll be prepared to get to the next level in a few weeks when we go for 8 trips up. We are still a long way from being ready for 37 trips up in 48 hours, but I’m confident Dave and I will be ready when the time comes… especially since I’ll be a bit more prepared.
One of my health goals this year is to increase the size of my legs, specifically my quadriceps. I think that for their size, they are pretty strong, but that’s relative because they are pretty skinny.
Proportionally I look like a guy who chooses to skip leg day. That’s not fully true, I work my legs almost daily, but that’s usually a weighted walk on the treadmill, or once-a-week sprints, and of course, mentioned many times here, the Coquitlam Crunch walks weekly.
Basically, I exercise my legs more than any other part of my body… but almost always walking, and for cardio rather than explicitly to strengthen and grow them. If I look back at last year, I’d guess I did about 40 or so leg days, barely over once a week for only 75% of the weeks in 2025. Then to start this year, I did legs on the 1st, then today, on the 11th.
My goal, which I will be tracking, is to get at least 78 dedicated leg days in this year. That’s an average of 1.5 times per week. This is harder that it would seem because I need at least 2 days rest after a leg day before my training to Everest the Crunch, because climbing the Crunch progressively more times to train is by no means fun after a leg day.
One thing I hate about leg day is that I find of all my body parts legs hurt the most for the next two day. That means over 150 days this year that I’m going to feel sore legs. Yuk. But if I’m going to gain another 10 pounds, another goal I have for the year, most of it will need to be on my legs. I’m not going to get much bulkier in my upper body, so legs are the place I have the most potential to grow.
So there it is, I’ve put my goals out into the universe, now I’ve got to make them real. Leg day #2 done for the year… I’ll link back here at the end of December.
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 joined a gym, and I took advantage of a deal to get 5 sessions with a trainer, for a great price. My trainer had me download MyFitnessPal, an App to track my calories and macros. I’ve been using this app for 10 days now and it has taught me a lot.
What I’ve learned first and foremost is that I have been totally clueless about my food intake. It’s such an important part of living healthy and yet I have had no idea what and how much protein I eat daily. I’m oblivious to how many calories I eat, and have zero sense for volume or weight of the food I eat… which makes knowing the benefits or consequencesof my food intake impossible.
I’ve ranged from 1,104 calories with 65g of protein to 4,554 calories with 186g of protein daily: Basically from subsistence to gluttony eating almost 200grams of fat on my ‘big’ day.
I’ve done this with zero connection to how much exercise I’ve had in a given day. My lowest day also included an hour and 16 minute workout going up and down the Coquitlam Crunch with a couple extra loops of the 457 stairs section.
I need to understand what I’m putting into my body, and also how much energy I’m outputting. I want to know what I do to fuel my body and ensure I’m doing so in a healthier way than I have been. Tracking is a start, knowledge is power, but it’s only a start. Tracking has taught me that I’ve got a lot more to learn.
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.
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear shares the idea of getting 1% better. What’s fascinating about this is that the evidence of improvement is not something you see early on.
Going to the gym 6 days a week for 2 weeks will not have your muscles bulging out of your previously loose shirt, but 2 years later you might need a new wardrobe. Reading just 10 minutes a day doesn’t make you an avid reader in 2 weeks, but 2 years later you’ve read a couple dozen books.
The idea of working to be just 1% better is fantastic, and it has some great long term benefits, with no downside. However, there is one thing to consider and that is avoiding pitfalls that set you backwards. The simple example is that you are making great progress in the gym then you push too hard and get an injury. Now it takes months of rehab before you can get back to where you were before the injury. That’s a lot of days not getting 1% better. Sometimes these injuries are from pushing too hard, sometimes it’s from a simple movement that your body wasn’t expecting. These are understandable, and not always avoidable.
On the other hand, sometimes these injuries fall in the ‘you better never’ category, fully avoidable and preventable.
You better never pick up a football and throw it to almost your maximum distance without warming up with a dozen or so short passes first.
You better never challenge someone half your age to a race and go from zero to full speed in 12 seconds.
You better never do that Instagram challenge where you contort your body and try to pick something up off the floor with your teeth.
Essentially, you better never do dumb shit that your body used to do easily when you were half your age, letting your ego get ahead of your current abilities.
On a journey to be ever better, you better never choose to do something where 10 seconds of misguided effort sets you back months of consistent progress.
I’m going to be joining a gym. I feel that I need to.
Sure I have a pretty good home gym. Sure I have been disciplined, working out on average 6 days a week. Sure it’s convenient not to leave the house early in the morning, and not add 25 minutes in my car getting to and from the gym. These are all wonderful perks of working out at home, and they’ve served me well for almost 7 years… but I need something else.
I need the camaraderie of working out with a friend.
I need a facility that will provide me with machines that I can work my legs without putting pressure on my back.
I need a place where I’m motivated to do more than my one-muscle-group workouts I’ve been doing at home.
I need to be around other people working hard to make themselves feel better.
But above all that, what I also need is to rebalance my morning routine to include longer workouts and travel time. I’ve loved my morning routine. I’ve developed great habits where my motivation to get going sits at zero and I still get everything done… it’s robotic, finish one task, immediately head to the next. Stacked habits that just happen once I wake up in the morning.
This morning I went to the gym for the first time and I’m writing this when I’m usually getting out of the shower to go to work. I’ll be arriving at work later than usual today, not late for work, just later than the norm. I also haven’t done my morning meditation, which will need to be moved to the evening. So already I see that things will need to change. And with that change, the autopilot gets turned off.
So, I need to create new systems, a different stacking of my habits, such that it gets re-automated. I’m sure I’ll have to pump up my motivation until that happens, but I’m so ready for this change.
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.
