I spent a good quarter of my time in university learning about how you shouldn’t make too many life changes at once. (I spent another quarter in anatomy or stressing out about anatomy, another quarter dropping classes possibly due to the unknown learning disability and ADHD, and the last quarter probably actually “focused”. This is not an accurate, nor mathematical, representation of university for me.) Yet, here I am, doing just that, because FULL SPEED AHEAD is the only way I know how to go.

So here I am. 13 days into logging with MyFitnessPal. That is nearly TWO WEEKS people, that’s an accomplishment.
I’ve opened up the Coach.Me app again last night and set up some goal in there—go for a walk twice a week, exercise three days a week, meditate daily, pray daily, and write a blog post [here] weekly (hi!). 

And today, I went for a walk. Just to the mailbox, to send a letter to my Member of Parliament. Have I mentioned I’ve gotten all politically engaged since we last spoke in depth? This is not actually a byproduct of that but still, could be why I was more interested in the Asthma Society’s Hill Day stuff in the end. Honestly, it’s a wonder to me that given the state of this world and our neighbours to the south, how the eff people can ignore this! I digress (but likely not forever, and would be happy to grab a [decaf] [not-]coffee with you and discuss. And also I am thinking about going back to school to do political science and no I don’t actually know what’s currently wrong with me.)

This is not significant. The walk, I mean. It was hot (27-feels-like-29 and heat and I are not friends—my lungs and my whole body) and slow and except whatever I GOT OUT THERE.

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Because here’s the thing. I have to start all over again. And so I am. I downloaded some bodyweight exercise app to my phone even. I’m LOOKING AT my Fitbit. Quantified self is one of those things that’s sort of engrained in my being one way or another so I need to USE that data. 

If a slow, 17 minute walk is all I get, guess what? It’s better than nothing.
If a three minute meditation before I go to sleep is all I do, guess what? I’ve started.
If prayer is a jumbled mess of words or a poem or “hey Jesus”? Yeah, my God knows where I’m at, even before I do.
If I don’t eat with any semblance of decency (or even if I’m closer than I usually am but still totally imperfect) but I am at least mindful of that, guess what? I’m one step closer.
If I start to write a blog post and I write “Listening to my body. Means. Going to sleep. Instead of writing.” and close my laptop, yes, I have figured something out. At least this time.
And if I admit all of this to you in a blog post? I’ve written the blog post. And hopefully, you’ll join me in stumbling towards those goals you think are too big, too hard, the things you think you’ll be imperfect at. Feel free to join me in the imperfection, learning the things they can’t teach in school.

Or at least watch along—because even stumbling is moving forward. 

I coach two teams, I am semi-active(-ish)—per Fitbit, I’ve averaged 178 total active minutes a week for the last 4 weeks (and this is a period of time I feel rather inactive, but it still puts me over the 150 recommended minutes a week… although that is really moderate activity and mine is, um, mostly not?). But sometimes keeping it interesting is hard, and sometimes I just want to stick with the typical things because they are familiar, and familiar is easy (except then I don’t do the things).

Late last year, ParticipACTION (Canada’s leading physical activity promotion non-profit) took a vote of which physical activities were the country’s favourites—selected activities (and those voted on) range from the predictable (duh, hockey) to the “WHAT IS THAT?” (snow snake, stick pull) to the “BUT HOW?” (white water rafting, axe throwing, highland games).
These final picks are known as the 150 Play List. So now, I am setting off on doing them all. Sadly I have many from last year that I could have checked off that I have little clue how I will get in again this year (sailing?!).

Finishing week two of the year, I’ve checked three activities off the list so far (note: ParticipACTION apparently counts each time you do an activity as 1, so the site says I’ve done 7. Okay?):

1) Goalball. Well it probably is not any surprise that my favourite activity on the list got completed really early. I play goalball with the guys I coach almost every week, and last week (our first week back after the holidays) threw some pretty hard shots at me. I was surprisingly unbruised (except one tiny bruise on my hip, which I thought would be larger.)

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Doug came to goalball for our first practice back. We spend a lot of time laying around on the floor in this sport, I will be honest. Unfortuantely due to my shortness this is not actually a great defensive strategy for me most of the time.

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2) Walking. That was easy. Well, actually not terribly so, considering the dump of snow on December 26th and the lack of sidewalk clearing crews out (until Steve got on the news about it, anyways.)

3) Soccer. We only had a couple of athletes at Special Olympics practice this week, which meant that the athletes got to choose what we did. After playing floor hockey for awhile, we played soccer. My passes are as inaccurate as ever, FYI.

For the next 5 weeks at Special O, we are trying to get as many of these activities in as we can with our athletes. I already have goalball checked off, but I hope to be adding another 24 activities as we explore them with our athletes!

Now, we’re supposed to be getting some warm weather (after our wicked cold snap) so I hope it doesn’t kill off all the skating rinks or that’s going to pose a bit of a problem in regard to checking of “skating” and “hockey”…

I try to track a lot of stuff, but I like that stuff to be as effortless as possible (I’m human, right?). The more stuff I track, the less likely I am to track a thing after a few days or a week, which means I really can’t do anything with that data. There are not a lot of things that will track themselves, however, thinking about this the other day, I became curious to do a bit of an inventory to see what kinds of things I am tracking basically automagically. (Magic, yes.)

Sleep.
For over 2 years (actually, well over 2 years, but I think some of my data got trapped in an old iPod or something before The Cloud was such a big thing), I’ve tapped the screen on my iPhone a few times to track my sleep—I use SleepCycle, and this same app acts as my alarm clock (and lets me use my own music—I actually initially bought it years ago because of that), so I have some motivation to set it. This is, aside from wearing my Fitbit, probably the most automated self-tracking actiivty that I do. So it’s not quite automagic… but it just about could be. (The Charge HR does have automatic sleep tracking though, as well, and I did use the sleep feature regularly on the One and Ultra).

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Graphs from SleepCycle. Above, time I went to bed over the last two-plus years. Below, the odd waves of different activity levels on my sleep quality…

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Activity.
I’ve been wearing a Fitbit since January 2012—first the Ultra, then the One, and now the Charge HR. This means, aside from the times that I’ve lost it or forgotten to wear it, I’ve been counting steps, calories burned, activity level, distance covered. Since May, I’ve got a near-continuous record of my heart rate—which is kind of ridiculous and I’m looking forward to someone getting that export heart rate thing figured out. And, since the invention of MobileTrack from Fitbit, even if my device dies on my wrist, I still accumulate a bit of data—though not as accurate as the thing attached to my body.
I also have a couple apps in my phone that serve this purpose. I’m not really sure why I haven’t deleted them yet, however.

Here’s also a little app called fit|line. It gives you all kinds of stats extracted from your Fitbit. It also says things like “You spend an average of 14 hours a day sedentary.” (Don’t worry. My Pebble Time is trying to put an end to that nonsense. Actually, I thought it would be like “You spend an average of 23 hours a day sedentary” so…)


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All time Fitbit stats from Fit|Line.
https://i0.wp.com/farm2.staticflickr.com/1673/25832612924_0b66f6916b.jpg?resize=281%2C500&ssl=1Slightly different view…

Here you’ll see where I lost my Fitbit, or forgot to wear it, or it died or whatever.
You can also fairly easily pick out the spot in 2013 when I was super sick and when I was no longer in school and no longer working outside of the house.

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Things I Set Up on IFTTT at Some Point And Forgot About.
Okay, let’s take a look.

  • If it rains, this gets sent to a spreadsheet in Google Drive. I was at some point going to trend this with peak flows and asthma symptoms but, ha, those don’t get logged automagically.
  • If humidity rises above 75% this gets added to a spreadsheet.
  • If I enter or exit a tennis club, these times are to be logged (a backup for logging my summer work hours).
  • This one doesn’t quite count because I have to manually check-in on Foursquare… SWARM. I have to check in on Swarm. (Damn these name changes, really.) but that does get sent to my Google Calendar. So if I forget when I went somewhere and I happened to check in on F—Swarm, then I can find out.
Computer Time.
I’ve been using RescueTime for quite awhile. So now I have all this data about how much time I spend doing what, and I really don’t do anything with that.
 
Similarly, I once installed Checky on my iPhone to see how many times I looked at my phone in a day, but it has to run in the background obviously, which then gets swiped closed.
Because once the guy at the Apple Store had to close all my apps and he told me he’d never seen that many apps open on a phone. And he works at the Apple Store. That’s pretty bad.
 
There are probably all kinds of other things, but that’s my rundown for 11:40 pm. I’ll add more here when I discover them.