Report Card

I made myself a report card. To some extent, the report card simply reflects what I can measure, not what is most important to me. But, because I can't control every outcome in my life, the report card also reflects what I am focusing on in the process. I can control what I do, and how that turns into important stuff is related, but outside my control.

The way to read this table is to not actually look at the specific numbers. I deliberately shrank the column size to obscure some numbers, and to make sure all twelve months will fit on a row. But I'm using the darkness of the color to reflect relative goodness. In some cases, a bigger number is better (eg, number of calories expended each day). In other cases, a smaller number is better (eg, expenditures). But I set the tones so darker is better in all things. The darker the column, the better the month was.

So first, fitness activities.  Calories and steps are from the fitbit. Averages can obscure extremes, so I also pull out active days (calories for the day were more than 2,000) and sedentary days (steps were less than 5,000 for the day). I use the Garmin for biking, walking, and running (only deliberate walks, not incidental steps during the day are counted). So as expected, August was pretty good in all measures. The surprise to me was May - as I recall, I started cutting back at work pretty heavily towards the end, and tried to get a jump start on fitness (and gardening projects). July suffered from the heat, but also possible from trying to do too much too soon in June, because I had some migraines and other bad days there.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Avg Calories Exp	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Days >2,000 cal	6	7	7	10	16	14	12	13
Avg Daily Steps	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Days <5 steps="" td="">	5	4	5	3	1	2	4	3
Miles Biked	-	-	-	-	-	-	5	9
Miles Walked	26	16	8	17	15	38	28	48
Miles Run	-	-	6	3	5	11	6	1

 The next group is about my weight. I can't control my weight, only what I eat. One of the proven techniques for weight loss is to track, so I'm reporting how many days I tracked. Lack of tracking in many ways reflects lack of effort or focus on weight loss. It's clear my weight has gone up since the first of the year. Not my main focus, but big sigh anyway. Besides tracking, I vowed to enjoy more, and waste less. I don't have a report on that, but I'm feeling like I'm getting there on both fronts.
  

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
End Weight (week)	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Days Food Tracked	0	10	0	0	0	0	0	16

 The next set of measures is meditation. This is measured because I use a meditation app, for guided meditations and as a timer. More meditation is an aspiration, and the coloring reflects that. The truth is, however, that January was so heavy on meditation because I was still in a great deal of pain from my knee surgery, and because I was upset a lot during the government shutdown. Meditation is a coping mechanism, so more might mean other things are off track. Also, recently, I'm feeling that I'm more mindful in transient ways throughout the day. Pausing to breathe a few times, feel my feet grounded, check in with my body. A good thing, and not captured anywhere but in my head.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
# Min Meditate	439	235	178	81	143	295	215	333
# Times Meditate	42	22	20	11	15	23	21	29

I'm tracking my money, in total, and by categories. I'm showing food expenditures (as a proxy for reduced waste and more cooking at home) and money spent on gas, as a proxy for miles driven. Less is more! Fewer dollars are a darker, good, color.  June food reflects house guests, including liquor purchases. How nice to see the reduced driving reflected in the lower fuel bills. I only bought gas once during each of July and August. Total spending is fluctuating, as I figure out the periodic bills like taxes and insurance, formerly paid either through a mortgage payment or deducted from my paycheck.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Total Spend	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Food Spend	####	####	####	####	####	####	####	####
Gas Spend	$72	$59	####	$87	$83	$84	$29	$26

Lastly are some miscellaneous things I can count, that maybe reflect some larger picture about my state of mind and energy. I track my books through Goodreader. Blog posts are obvious. "Trips downtown" show engagement with my peeps from work, and engagement on the culture front (museums, performances, etc.). And, being at the boat, as was explained recently, is my happy place.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug
# Books Read	8	7	4	1	0	12	11	9
# Blog Posts	6	8	7	6	3	6	8	7
# Trips downtown	--	--	--	--	--	1	5	2
# Days Boat	--	--	--	1	2	3	2	7

 So there you have my overview. If you step back and squint, more and darker green is a good thing, and in general, things are looking up!

Pride

Get out there and do stuff!

Me at the helm

This is what it's all about.  I'm just home from a peak lifetime experience, and I'm very happy, and very very tired, but not hurt or exhausted or sick. I want to do more, be more, keep moving on and on!

What did you want to be when you were growing up? I'm just a little bit too old for Cowboy, or Fireman, or even Doctor, to have been in the scheme of things I could choose, just like I couldn't choose to be an elf or a fairy. But pretty early on, I fixed on Sailor.  The Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome told me a girl could be master of her own ship, the equal of any boy. Those books literally changed my life, as I tried my best to be Nancy Blackett, terror of the seas (who couldn't use her given name Ruth as pirates must be ruthless).  I had a boat in high school, and spent as much time as possible on board, learning courage and capabilities along the way. I took a hiatus from sailing in college, but have a boat now and continue to find it restoring and good for my self confidence and self image. This is even when I have to deal with a crisis such as it appearing to sink, as in the past couple of weeks. (A week ago Sunday night I packed a sleeping bag and chocolate and was prepared to spend the night pumping to keep her afloat - turned out not to be necessary, which in some tiny way disappointed me, though not really.) "Figure it out, and deal with it" is the story aboard.

The Pride of Baltimore II is quite possibly the prettiest ship ever built. A historic replica, it is the goodwill ambassador for the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland. The original Pride was built in the early 1980's, and it was the symbol of the restoration of the Baltimore waterfront, and it led the way to Baltimore's resurrection as a wonderful city. After the original sank, money was raised for an even better new Pride. Built on the lines of Baltimore privateers that were crucial to American victory in the war of 1812, she is just plain gorgeous. Imagine my delight to discover one could pay to be a guest crew aboard!  Like a dude ranch, or fantasy sports camp, this was fulfillment of life long fantasies.

You'll never see anything more beautiful!

There is a friggin' lot of work to be done to sail such a boat.  The crew is a collection of a dozen 20-somethings, with motley backgrounds and uncertain futures. But they sail this boat with grit, determination, skill, and confidence. And they are young women, as well as young men, right there in the thick of it, with their seaman's papers and the resume of a variety of tall ships behind them.

My regular sailing partner and I met the boat in Philadelphia, where there were several other tall ships gathered. We cast off around 8:30 pm, and motored through the chill and windy October night down the Delaware River, through international shipping and ship yards, under bridges. We were stationed on the bow as lookouts, and it was a real job. We were looking for less visible objects, because she is so big there is not always a clear view forward.  At midnight we passed under the Delaware Memorial Bridge (the one that gets you to the New Jersey turnpike) and we were off watch and went below.  We were both exhausted and were cold during the night.

Can you spot the hazard?

When we woke at first light, it was drizzling and we were back in the Chesapeake Bay. In fact, when I popped up on deck to look around, I recognized where we were at once- passing Poole's Island, north of Baltimore. As soon as the crew was fed, up went the sails. This was a big, huge, confusing job, involving many many lines and confusing sets of protocols and orders. We were given guidance, and were encouraged to put our backs into pulling whatever could be pulled on, and coiling and stowing things over and over again.  I was astonished at how very much backbreaking labor went into the job. There is art, too, in how to pull so it's useful, and it took a bit to get the finesse on it.

Food was hot and hearty and plentiful.  Not much time was spent sitting around - mostly it was standing around, when there weren't things to pull on or lines to be coiled. We were on deck through the whole rainy day. We went into the Pride's home port of Baltimore, and picked up several college students with their history professors. They were reportedly studying nineteenth century maritime law, and this was a field trip for them  The whole crew was tired, and invited the college students to pitch in and give it a whirl. Enthusiasm on the first pull quickly turned into astonishment at how hard it really was, and most of them opted out from there on out.  I felt pretty good about not only how hard I had been working, but also was so pleased that finally I was repeating some complex activity and could actually track what was going on and what would happen next. By then, we were identifying ourselves as "crew" not "passengers", and were proud of our ship.

We spent the night on the docked ship in Baltimore, and headed home this morning.  I'm tired, but I'm happy. I really worked hard, and those trips to the gym made a difference for me. I was pulling, and bending, and stooping, and twisting, and here I am, happy and not even reaching for the ibuprophen (yet). I'm pretty sure, though, that I had more coffee during these two days than in the previous two weeks put together.

As we were leaving, I took my tightly packed small but heavy duffel and slung it over my shoulder. One of the crew offered to help with it, but I went up the companionway ladder, and down the gangplank, with a bit of swagger in my walk. Home from sea (all two days of it) and ready for some liberty ashore before the next adventure.

Some Virtue, Some Results; Some Transgressions, Some Other Results

I'm filled with self-congratulatory virtue this morning about my activity levels. I don't need to go to work today, and yet I was at the gym for personal training at 6 this morning (surprising cold this morning). I stayed after to run on their treadmill, and then took the dog for a long-ish walk (more than the minimum) right afterwards.

Perhaps all of this activity was at least partly sparked by my incredibly high reading on the scale this morning. I know I've been eating poorly, but didn't think it was that poorly. My food tracking sparked by the last post just a week ago only lasted a couple of days, so I don't have the data to analyze, but I have a distinct memory of a chocolate ice cream sandwich in there somewhere, not to mention the wonderful fajitas last night out with the family.

I've had the vague theory that all I needed to do was keep the activity up, mind most of my eating, and treats would be ok. Maybe they would if treats were small and occasional, but not big, constant, and more than once a day.

So I think I really really need to track. It's a pain, but it really makes a difference. It seems to do a couple of things for my motivation.  Knowing I'm going to write it down causes me to change my behavior in advance. Having the proof in the data afterwards when I'm disappointed in the scale readings also is useful. It is really annoying, but I need to do it - if I care about my weight. And I do care about my weight.  So tracking is an action I need to motivate.  Yes, it's only a means to accomplish a different activity: eating better. But it seems to work, so motivating and rewarding tracking in and of itself - regardless of what I actually eat - is a meta-activity, or the high leverage point to accomplish what I really want: eating better and losing weight.

I sure wish there were even more seamless ways to track my eating. There is at least one app out there where you can take a photo of your food and it tries to estimate calories automatically. I don't know how well it works, but since I'm at least as focused on what I eat as how much, I don't think that would do it for me. I've found the single best food tracker to be My Fitness Pal. It has the normal annoying assumptions about what I'm supposed to eat which I reject.  But it has the most comprehensive database of food, the ability to snap barcodes from the iphone, and versions for iphone, ipad and computer with all the data living in the cloud. It also talks to many other apps, so it exchanges activity data with my magic BMF activity tracker (raising its estimate of how many calories I can eat) and my scale, and the apps for those devices also pull in the food data.  The one thing I don't like about the app (besides having to enter data at all which I can't find a way around) is the inability to export data for my own offline analysis.  In fact, because MFP talks to my BMF activity tracker, I export summary food info from BMF instead.  It's not very satisfactory, since it lacks a lot of detail but it's better than typing in data.

I've found one way to fuel my motivation for diet and exercise is to spend money. I make myself comply with something, and then if I do, I buy stuff. After running for three weeks, I bought three pieces of workout clothing.  I was absurdly pleased last night to lay out my clothes for 5:30 this morning including my new bright blue miracle fabric workout tee, and even more pleased at the gym this morning to realize the shade exactly matches my blue-and-green running shoes. (I always say, attention to detail is the keynote to fashion success.) Now, I have to find stuff I really want for it to be motivating. Sometimes I shop first (online) and save my shopping cart for later.  It also requires me to have discipline about not buying stuff just because I want it when I want it.

I have to do some work to find my quest object. I've also found that I need to not make the finish line too far away - a couple or three weeks.  So we'll see how it goes.

Boots

I've done ok for the past few weeks.  I started tracking in weight watchers again, and that helped motivate me to move more, to get those activity points added back to my allowance.  The fact is, I won't lose weight if I use all my daily and weekly points - at least that seems to be the case so far.  I'm not sure I have enough data to really verify this, because I don't think I've kept on tracking long enough for it to be proven one way or another, but mostly I'm not losing, not gaining, and have a bunch of the weekly points left over at the end of the week.

When I first started tracking again, it was because I had seen numbers on the scale above and beyond my normal fluctuations and alarm bells were going off full force. As it turned out, a catalogue appeared the day I decided to get serious, and there was this dress... Heavily influenced by Mad Men, I had to have this shirtwaist flirty dress. I've been wearing a lot of casual dresses this summer (sans hose, as appears to be the DC summer practical code, hooray) and it was a peach. But, slightly out of my normal price range, I decided to use it as a reward. I was a little bit fuzzy on what I had to do for the reward - "be good" for a few weeks.  I kept the catalogue open to that page, and looked at it often.

I've started to get moving, and moving begets moving. Another catalogue came this week, and it was specializing in boots.  I have never had tall boots that I really liked, and I've always wanted them. So the reward system became a bit amended:  get out there and run, and earn my boots. But, I am finding that nearly impossible to do on weekday mornings. I am not making even six hours sleep most nights, and it makes me very cranky. I set the alarm in the morning, and I get to the gym appointment, but the appointment with myself? Not so much.

I have added a lot of walking. I've gotten back into at least a quick mile on the mall at lunch, and Friday night I was suddenly left on my own as the family all made different plans, and so I got a solid three miles in.  Both yesterday and today I got out in the morning to run, and I've got a lot of re-conditioning to do by October 6 when the next 5K comes along.

I decided Friday that if I did my Friday night walk, and ran both Saturday and Sunday, I could buy boots. Still in my sweaty clothes, I sat down at the computer and did just that this afternoon.  I hope I like them!

The goals for the next time period are all around running, not around eating or weight. We'll see if one follows the other.

Week #4 Session #1

This was really tough.  I knew it would be, and I was a little afraid I wouldn't be able to do this.  The routine this week nearly doubles the amount of time running overall, from nine minutes to sixteen out of thirty.  Yikes!  It's good to kick it up to the next level on a Sunday, when I can optimize this - a good night's sleep, wake naturally, drink coffee and wake up thoroughly, before venturing into exercise.  Even so, I decided last night I might need another inducement to do this, so I picked something from a catalog to reward myself with, after completing what I had to do.  Not workout clothes, though I may eventually need to get something different for running. But a nice top I had been thinking about, a cotton and cashmere knit sweater jacket on sale.

Yeah, I did it. Yeah, it was really hard.  Probably, if I hadn't been telling everyone in the world I'm going to run this 5K, I wouldn't have finished it. Let's never underestimate the power of public humiliation.

This week, there are three minute runs and five minute runs.  The first three minute one was fine - in fact, it even felt good while I was doing it.  I wasn't staring at the clock waiting for it to be over, at least. I was able to look ahead and listen to the music, and feel like my body was working fine.  The five minute runs, however, were hard to get through.  I decided I was would allow myself to drop the speed from the 5.5 mph I had been doing to whatever it took to get me through.  On the first five minute run, for the last minute I dropped down to 5.3 mph.  And on the second, I dropped first to 5.3 mph (about half way through) finally to 4.8 mph for the last ninety seconds.  Oddly, my heart rate was ok - in the low one-fifties - but I felt I was out of breath. Gasping like a fish. Little things began to hurt. My foot, my knee, the sweat dripping into my eyes was stinging. Then, serendiptiously, the music shuffled on the ipod to something that allowed me to match the pace and get through the last minute.  I allowed the music (a nothing but pleasant pop song I picked up from my girl) to carry my feet, my hands, and my heart and lungs forward for the last minute.  But my finger was pressing the speed control the second I hit the mark to slow down.

I kept going to complete the whole 5k, and after catching my breath, I sped up the walk to 3.7 mph.  I haven't walked that fast very much, but a tip at the gym about swinging my arms out a lot (bent arms with fists like a runner) has helped me maintain a faster pace more comfortably. This kept my heart rate around 130 for the balance of the time. This in total was a lot faster than last week, not surprisingly with twice as much running and a faster walk. I hit 2.0 miles at 26 minutes, and my 30 minute Couch-to-5K stats are averaging 4.3 mph and 14 mpm.  Much faster than before.  I finished the 5K at 44:27, for an average of 4.2 mph and 14.3 minutes per mile.  (Last week the 5K took 47 minutes.)  I did a small amount of stretching / yoga postures afterwards, but no other workout.

I'm a little nervous about how well I'll do at 5:30 am on Tuesday.  But now I've proved I can do this. If I need to, I'll drop the pace, but keep at least a jog going for all the prescribed times. The point is to finish, not to go fast. And, if I want to, I can repeat this week's routine for longer than a week.  I am fifteen weeks out from the road race I'm signed up for, and in week four of a nine-week routine, so I have time.

I also think I should do more of a cardio workout on the four days a week I'm not doing this running routine.  I'm going to the gym, and sometimes (not every day) strolling around at lunch time or after work.  But I'm thinking a brisk walk in the evenings would be really worthwhile.  After reading Bossypants by Tina Fey I started streaming 30 Rock from NetFlix, and 22 minutes at more than a stroll (I'm thinking my 3.7 mph walk to get the heart rate above 80%) with the iPad on the treadmill streaming the show, might be a useful cardio add.  Not likely to do it every day, but any at all is good.

Rewards

In spite of my last post, I've actually been doing pretty well. I measure my total loss from the single-day-high post Christmas - and on Friday (my lowest day so far) I was 8 pounds lighter.  More importantly, I've been doing what I set out to do. I have been planning and mostly controlling my eating. I have been exercising and looking for opportunities to be more active. I have been adding more vegetables into my diet.

So when a sale catalogue of jewelry from the Metropolitan Museum came by, I didn't just browse and toss. I hung onto it, studied it, and picked out a bracelet, way more than I would ordinarily get for myself:

Today I made my planned reward level and point, click, it's on its way!

Rewards

One of the specific techniques in the Beck approach is to make up a list of (non-food) rewards to use when you have hit a specific milestone - a five-pound mark, for example.  Since mostly I deny myself nothing, it was hard to think of rewards that I wouldn't just go get on my own anyway.  But here is the beginning of my list:

Books
Clothes

If I get to a significant milestone, I'll get myself a leather jacket for the Vespa.