Adventure

So, I'm doing a thing. I'm a little bit nervous. No, I'm a LOT nervous. But I want adventure.

I'm going on a TWO WEEK VOYAGE aboard Pride of Baltimore II, my schooner. They posted the itinerary Wednesday, I slept on it and signed up Thursday, and I have to pay by Monday. And the trip begins March 15. That's right, March. Before the first day of spring, even.

We're going from Baltimore to Saint Petersburg, Florida. That will be down the length of the Chesapeake Bay, out into the ocean, around Cape Hatteras, down along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, along Florida and around or through the Keys, and back up into the Gulf of Mexico to St Pete. It's about 1400 nautical miles.

The way these voyages go, they set a longer than absolutely needed period of time to make the trip, and then study the forecasts and actually do the sailing in the best weather window. I figure at only six knots, it's about 10 days, so there is a lot of room for adjustment at either end. Probably, once we set off, we pretty much stay out until we get there. No stops are planned along the way. And for a ship the size of Pride II you can't just pull into any marina along the way for a break. I understand any impromptu stops are generally anchoring rather than tying up to a dock somewhere. I'll book my flight home in a refundable way, because it might need to be changed based on what we do.

When we get closer, I'll be able to refine what clothes I need based on the weather. But it'll be winter, and colder on the water, so bundling up for the first week seems in order. Then, Florida in March? On the water? Mild, not freezing, but not hot by any means. Layers. And rain gear. And nylon undies so I can wash them out - no laundry on the boat, and two weeks is too long to pack for. 

Six weeks from now, I can be a little bit stronger than I am today, and I actually feel pretty good today. But this is a very big kedge to help motivate me to action to stay strong! I know I can do the basics aboard, up and down ladders, standing and sitting around, holding the wheel, pulling on ropes, coiling lines. In the unlikely event it gets really rough, I'll opt out of anything that makes me nervous. But the stronger I am, the better off I'll be. 

Yippee! Looking at the photos from previous trips are making me smile!

Five Things for 2023

Snapped right after a new color in the hair.
Also shows the hips, as big as ever!

The month is nearly over, but I'm finally getting around to sharing some of my notions for 2023. I like to use milestones to take stock and think about changes, whether or not they fit the mold of "resolutions", and whether or not you are doing it at year end. So here I am. New hair and all.

I am very influenced in how I'm doing these things by Gretchen Rubin and her podcast, "Happier". For several years, she and her sister have been promoting ways to think about what you want to accomplish and tools to get that done. So some of this is borrowed.

There is not a word about weight here. I've tied with the highest weight of my life. I can't say I don't truly care, but it is not my focus right now. What is my focus is getting stronger and getting out there and doing things.

1. Word of the year
   Funny, this word just came to me yesterday. I'd been mulling it over, various iterations of how to describe being more active in a single word that would resonate. Maybe because it's movie season, it finally clicked: "ACTION!". Less sitting on the couch planning to do things, more actually doing them.
   
   
2. Outside 23 for 23
   This is pure Happier podcast. For several years, they have been promoting a specific action to be done for a certain amount of time every day for the year. They did things like "walk 20 minutes in 2020". This year, it's be outside for 23 minutes every day in 2023.  There are so many benefits to being outside, proven often. And, one is more likely to do things outside if you are trying to be outside anyway.
   
   The only rule to participate is there are no rules - just do something that is meaningful to you. So passing between house, car and stores can count if you want it to. I had a very low energy day where I sat in the sunshine in back wrapped in blankets watching Bixby. Definitely counts.
   
   I have to confess that despite the lax rules, by any construction I have failed at this three times already this year. Each of these was a nasty cold day with solid rain and wind. Still, I think I can do better. I do have a covered front porch - I could swaddle in blankets and sit out there. Even better, I have rain gear, and it works.
   
   
3. Minimum Baseline
   This is an idea I got from a running coach. She used in the context of "every run feels like crap as you start". And so the idea is to get out there and tell yourself there is an absolute minimum you can do no matter what - even if it's just put on the running clothes and jog 100 yards. In my case, it's not about running goals, but overall activity for the day. I've tracked my daily steps for more than a decade. For the past several years, in addition to looking at monthly average steps,  I've looked at the metric of how many days had fewer than 5,000 steps. If you look at my previous report card post, you will see that December had 15 days where I walked fewer than 5,000 steps! That is an all time high! An all time low for sluglike days! Without an office to go to, and with fewer and shorter dog walks in the works (see below) I do have to work at 5,000 steps. But it is ridiculous to be that inactive. I do need to walk my feisty little dog. In addition, while I did succeed in getting rid of my treadmill (yay!) I still have my little trampoline. That gives me about 1,000 steps for every 10 minutes of bouncing. Bouncing is definitely a workout - generally gets the heart rate up higher than just strolling. That is my backup if it's a nasty day where neither the dog nor I want to go out.
   
   So I've only had one day so far this year where I fell below 5,000 steps in a day. I think what happened is that it was a nasty day, I was thinking I'd get a chance to bounce my way to the finish line, but then I discovered I had to be on the phone or zoom from 5 pm to 9 pm. When I finished with talking to people, I was 2,000 steps short of the goal and not prepared to work that hard for at least 20 minutes instead of going to bed.
   
   But having been caught up once, now I'm alert to this. I can manage my time better and make sure this particular trap doesn't catch me again.
   
   
4. Bixby Training
   Bixby is the snuggliest dog in the world, for me. But he is very barky. He lives in a high state of arousal, which is not good for him nor for me. He can get into a barking frenzy, and he moves into Rumpelstiltskin mode where I think he will simply explode if he doesn't stop.  (He appears to have a very solid bite inhibition so I don't think there is any danger, but it's a lot of barking and lunging.) I am working on training him out of this. I have known general approaches to this for years, but I've decided to really buckle down and work on this right now. Very specifically right now, I'm working on the leash reactivity, rather than a big focus on the home barking. My trainer recommended to pick one where I can be consistent and focused. I decided that right now, it's more important to me to be able to take him on walks than to calm him down in the house.  During this time, it's better to avoid ever getting him over the reactivity threshold when we're out on the leash, so it's close to home, with a full pouch of very high value treats, and a close eye on what is going on around us. I believe I'm making progress with him. Today, I took him down into the park (at 7 am!) for the first time in a while. I was able to keep him calm the whole time despite seeing some dogs from a bit of distance, but he was very near the threshold when we got home. But, progress!
   
   So I also am striving for a Bixby minimum baseline, on leash and off our property for at least ten minutes every day. More short sessions is better than long ones like today's more than 30 minute walk.
   
   
5. Have Adventures!
   I love staying home and reading about other people's adventures. But when I get out there and do something different than usual, I love it. My threshold for "adventure" is very low. A trip I took to a resort/shopping development in January for a couple of hours counts. Hiking in new places count. Participating with a bunch of strangers in an usual performance art activity will count, too, if it comes together. Actual objective adventure also counts!
   

Let's Put 2022 to Bed

 Let's wrap this puppy up. While I didn't do a lot of posting about the metrics of my life, I did keep up my spreadsheets and graphs. I find it is helpful to have a "just the facts" look at how my life is unfolding. Memory is unreliable, and these numbers tell a story.

Here is 2022 by month, and yearly totals for the last four years. In general, darker is better. 
I put migraines in red and reversed this (darker is worse).  And in the bottom (yellow) section, I'm not sure more is always better - more books, for example, is not always better.

 The whole overview of the year is above, complete with context from prior years. Looking first at the yearly trends, look at the first section - activity measures. It's been downhill since 2019 (when I retired partway through the year). But I managed to turn around the downhill trend on some of these things - 2022 was more active by some measures than 2021. This was and is a hard fought battle. I didn't bike at all, I ran one whole mile, but I did get out there and walk! But not every day, by no means. I had more low activity days (days with less than 5,000 steps) than ever before, by a fairly wide margin.

The next little section shows the sad story of my weight - after holding it steady for the previous three years, I put on fifteen pounds and tied with my previous all time high. Let's just leave that there for now.

The next section contains some measures of wellness. I fell off the formal meditation bandwagon big time, this year. I believe I incorporate moments of mindfulness throughout my life in ways I didn't before I started meditating, but I don't sit for a practice much any more. In fact, many of the times I show I meditated, I put on a recorded meditation in the middle of the night in order to try to get back to sleep. In good news, migraine hours continue to decline! Two months with NO MIGRAINES at all! Woohoo! Sleep is relatively steady, and resting heart rate bounced around during the year, but the overall average didn't change that much.

The last section tracks various enrichment things. Again, these are not necessarily the most important things, but are things that are relatively easy to track and do show some softer aspects of my life. I was a reading machine this year, I wish I'd seen more movies, I hardly blogged at all, and likewise I failed to enjoy the delights of the city and city friends. But I traveled a lot, and I got a decent amount of sailing in. 

I've found the story of the ups and downs of the year are best captured in a graph of my daily steps throughout the year.

The dots are the daily step totals. The dark blue line is a running monthly average, and so shows the longer term trend hidden within the noise of daily variation. The lighter blue line is a running weekly average, so shows a shorter term trend than the monthly one.

So follow along the graphlines to read the story of my year. We start with an optimistic and motivated January, with several very busy days, followed by a steady decline in late winter and early spring as the bad weather and my bad knees dragged me down. There were some high points, but the trip to the Utah desert in March was disappointing as the weather kept us in. The weather got better during spring in Maryland, and I went out to California in April and I walked my brains out. Back home, I tried to get off the couch to train for my trip to the Nordic Isles in June and July, but pretty much I just hoped for the best and as a result I failed to enjoy the trip as much as I could have. I overused my knees and was often in pain.

I vowed to do better for my planned trip to Greece. We see a steady increase in average steps, facilitated by cortisone shots in my knees at the end of August, and steady physical therapy during September and October. Greece went really well, until I got covid. 

So the rest of the year was in the cellar, with constant struggles to get off the couch and move. The month of December has the lowest average steps of any month in years. It also has the most number of very low activity days. So I went on some walks, but consistency is lacking.

Steps are clearly a proxy for overall activity, but I think it's a pretty good substitute. I know that studies have shown that there is a clear relationship between few steps and all-cause mortality. From 4,000 steps a day to 8,000 steps a day, there is a clear relationship where more steps and better health are very tightly correlated. This is a correlation, and there is NOT a clear demonstration that moving from fewer steps to more steps results in better outcomes. It could be that folks in an unstoppable decline walk less. Is there such a thing as an unstoppable decline?

I don't want to end on a sour note, so let me say that right now, in the beginning of January, I feel pretty good, and very motivated to keep moving. I know deeply that moving more makes me feel better - there can be a virtuous spiral upward. So let's leave last year behind us, with maybe a few lessons learned, and go forward to the new year.

Go As You Mean To Follow

We've had delightful weather so far this year (creepily warm). I'm taking advantage of it to get out there and walk. I plan (hope) to do a post recapping 2022, and share my current thinking about goals for this next year. I've got a little data collection to do for each of those, so I thought I'd start off by bragging about my streak (THREE WHOLE FREAKING TIMES IN A ROW!!!!) days of walking. None of these are marathons, but it's good to get out there at all.

The first, on a crisp and sunny New Year's morning, is my "normal" walk - the mile and and half that goes down to the creek and back up through the neighborhood. I'd like to make this my minimum.

 

The following day, Monday, I went up to check on the boat and took a walk in the county park near-by.

And today, I dropped my big boy off at the airport this morning, and went exploring to a new-ish development, National Harbor. I had never been there, though I think it may have been open for a decade. It's got a Gaylord Resort, a convention center, and a mixed retail/restaurant/residential development built as a brand-new playground along the Potomac River across from Alexandria, Virginia. It was drizzling, I moseyed along looking at things, I didn't stay long, but I'm glad I scratched my exploring itch at least mildly.

I think I'll post these on my Quick Log, and I'll pick up posting these kinds of things there.