100 Days
Here we are. 100 days after New Year and it's common practice to report what happened and how we stuck to the plan, right?
Did we keep our resolutions?
Did we exercise more?
Eat less junk food?
Meditate and kept some "me" time?
Read and educate ourselves?
Well, in terms of exercising I'm proud to say I walked 55 times (out of 71 weekdays) during my lunch break. We have a very nice routine with a 2.4km tour in our neighborhood which takes between 23 and 25 minutes to complete. All homeworking/homestudying members of my family, my wife, one or two daughters and me gather at noon to walk and talk. The soup is ready on the stove and the first 2 leafs of bread are already in the toaster. When we finish the tour we can use the remainder of the hour to eat. It's a routine. It went into our patterns and we rarely miss the walk as we're habit animals.
A nice feature in Strava is the matched activities one. Obviously - you know me - I record the walk with my Apple Watch and with this Strava feature you can compare with the 54 other times we walked the same tour. It all might seam very structured and rigid but it really helps to keep the resolution. On the more creative side of things we always talk about what happened during our mornings and we now know much more about each family member. My youngest daughter keeps trying to explain quantum physics and tangled spinning electrons behavior to me, my wife amazes me with stories about people's reactions to the pandemic and my eldest daughter faces generational differences in digital skills at work. We exchange, debate, learn while we exercise. The best of both worlds!
On the biking side it's my 68th consecutive week with at least one tour on record.
Thanks to Veloviewer I have a nice overview of all my cycling since 2012. As said in previous blogs I'm really helped by the fixed Wednesday evening tour with the Antwerp Bicycling Club (ABC) and the Sunday morning tour of the Beerschot Cycling Club (BCC) to have no excuse not to ride. The current lock-down-ish rules in Belgium limit the group size to 4, it was 10 a month ago, and we obviously respect this rigorously. Next to the ABC and BCC happenings I still benefit from my Zwift/Tacx/Strava combination for when the weather is too bad or when I have too severe time constraints. One hour indoor can be heavy enough to be worthy the effort.
A very nice feature of Veloviewer is the projected year end graph. You can weight the trend of the previous years with the trend of the last 30 days (I leave it 50/50) to forecast how many km you will pedal this year. I get a motivational boost by keeping this year's curve above last year's.
Next to that I'm also using the Strava weekly and yearly goals to keep my competitive self alive.
I moved from 100km to 150km weekly goal when we moved to Summer Time schedule in Belgium as it gives me more mileage potential on the ABC Wednesday evening rides.
It was also with pleasure that I met again with some of my short ski buddies on Easter Monday to enjoy a bicycle ride together. Some 15 years ago we were all in International jobs at HP and we decided to extend a Geneva meeting with a ski weekend. We repeated it yearly till last year when a nasty virus forced us to put our plan on hold. However, as some are also cyclists we can still exercise together. As a kind of subliminal reference to our ski passion we combined sun and snow during our ride!
So, yes, after 100 days I can say that walking and biking has kept me aligned with my resolution. More than ever I'm convinced that Sic Moventur is key for our mental and physical wellness. We have highly demanding jobs in a super stressful period with high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Practicing sports is a real need and allows us to cope with it. Enjoy moving!
PS1: My youngest daughter wanted to try homelearning while walking so we purchased a small foldable treadmill. I tried running a bit... Maybe turning this into routine? Not sure yet!
PS2: Our son left the house so we transformed his former room into an indoor gym. The indoor bike, some yoga mats, the small treadmill and... A rowing machine for those rainy days when I want something else than indoor cycling. Maybe turning this into routine? Not sure yet!