Monday, November 19, 2012

Decadethlon – Origins of the Decadethlon


In my last blog entry I introduced my habit of recording my workouts and how tracking can motivate you to keep tracking (ie – continue going to the gym, while eating chocolate, rather than just eating chocolate). Below is more about how I began the record keeping.

Let’s begin at the beginning, before the recording began: 1999, end of the millenium, when I received my first Franklin Covey planner while working at World Wildlife Fund, first in Washington, DC and later in Frankfurt, Germany. This was important because I graduated from my usual Garfield comics calendar to an actual planner, and began using it to schedule things and record my expenses. Here I might add that back then, as now, I manually recorded everything. I mean using a pencil. Remember those? My kids use an iPad, I don’t know how to turn one on. But that’s next year’s goal, I digress.

Last year, when the idea came to me to chart all my previous recorded workouts as far back as I could go, I noticed, flipping through a decade of calendar pages, to my dismay, that I had not begun recording my workouts until 2001. This is not to say that I had not been working out prior to 2001 – I’ve been jogging since the age of 8 (I began in those 70s Nike sneakers that now some Japanese consumers apparently would pay good money to have - too bad I don’t still have them. But I do have my t-shirt from a Bay to Breakers fun from 1981 which I never ran because I came down with bronchitis, still in new condition, not for sale), I’ve been swimming since the age of 5 (not without almost drowing first), and skiing since the age of 3 (wedged between my Dad’s skis on my own little wooden ones.)

So, the year 2000 – that January my boyfriend of 5 years and I had moved from a small cowtown outside (literally called “Stierstadt”) of Frankfurt to New York City, and had our suitcases stolen from our otherwise empty apartment on the first day we moved in. Our jetlagged cats slept through it all. (The Manhattan police officers came in and said in their finest Brooklyn accents, “What’d they do? Steal all ya fahnitcha?” At the time, it was not funny.) Serendipity, my boss’ generosity, and a previous internship got me a job at Scholastic in swanky Soho, and I enrolled in a “passport membership” at the then already omnipresent New York Sports Club one block away. In September, I ran my first Race for the Cure in Manhattan, and I actually still remember how out of shape I was, gasping for breath after the first mile, as women of every age bounded past me like gazelles in Reeboks. I consoled myself with chocolate afterwards. That fall I also bought myself a decent case to house my planner, which now served as my life notebook. I got to the gym to take classes with my cublicle-mates two or three times a week, as I remember.

By 2001, I had begun recording my workouts. It turns out, that in my decade of recording, this year ranks as the second lowest in number of days I worked out in one year. That year, I had two scar revisions on my abdomen from an appendix scar from five years prior, had lasik performed on my eyes by, in my opinion, the world’s best lasik sugeon and patentor, Dr. Robert Spector, got engaged, moved to DC out of Manhattan three days before 9/11 happened, became a Foreign Service MOS (Member of Household) the day before 9/11, heard a rumor on 9/11 that a bomb had gone off outside the State Department where my fiance was on his second day of work, while I was a mile from the Pentagon. As I watched  - on a television in a non-descript conference room, surrounded by people with almost no connection to NYC -  the second tower fall, I cried tears of grief and disbelief for the city and people we had just left behind. After the panic run to fill up the gas tank, buy extra water, tuna and toilet paper, the hours in front of the TV reliving the horror of 9/11, we returned weeks later to NYC to visit and tried to make sense of the tragedy, having lived across the street from the front door of the Armory in Midtown Manhattan, which had become the hub for reporting missing persons. But that’s another story. That fall we found out we were posted to Paris and began planning our wedding, to be held in four months’ time. So I got down to the cheerier business of florists, photographers and wedding cakes. Both the lasik and the scar revisions gave me good excuses not to work out, but the most effective exercize deterrent that year turned out to be wedding planning. Who has time for treadmills when there are wedding cake frostings to be sampled? Days Worked Out: 104 out of 365 or 28%. Best month: July. 17 out of 31 days, or 55%. Worst months: November and December: Null Set!

The table below proves that I have been able to convert some of my record-keeping from pencil to digital. It also shows the rise and fall of my 2nd lowest year in terms of workouts. I guess having a job, a few surgeries, getting engaged, moving, and experiencing 9/11 from afar, had an overall impact on my gym attendance.

2001
Days worked out
Days in Month




January
12
31
39%
February
8
28
29%
March
14
31
45%
April
15
30
50%
May
15
31
48%
June
3
30
10%
July
17
31
55%
August
6
31
19%
September
4
30
13%
October
10
31
32%
November
0
30
0%
December
0
31
0%




Total
104
365
28%

Tune in next week for the next installment: The impact that becoming a Foreign Service Spouse, or EFM – “Eligible Family Member” in State Department parlance, moving to France, and breaking a wrist had on the frequency of my workouts.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Decadethlon – Just Track It!


I bet you don’t know anyone who has recorded their every workout for the past decade. Well, now you do. And watch out, this might take you a decade to read. (Which is why I’ve divided “Decadethlon” into a series of digestable chapters, like a good, small chocolate before before a workout.)

My German engineering genes have kept me on task for 10+ years in a row, recording my workouts on a daily basis. Let us not call this “Anally Retentive Behavior.” Let us call it “Discipline and Dedication” (that makes me feel better). I may have skipped weeks at a time and certainly days at a time, but the reasons for either skipping workouts or doing them have turned out to be interesting to track, and here’s why:

I learned that if you record it, you want to record more, hence you do more, whether it’s in the realm of workouts, chocolate consumption, or social scheduling. My husband says, if you record it, you get better at it. He is referring, of course, to recording expenses and watching the budget. After 15 years of recording our every US Dollar, Deutsche Mark, French Franc, Swiss Franc, Croatian Kuna, European Euro, English Pound, Singaporean Dollar, Russian Ruble and Japanese Yen spent, I can say with confidence, that, at least in this case, he was right. Looking back, we can even learn a bit about our history and the world, and a bit about ourselves, for better or for worse, when we keep track of ourselves.

Over the past decade, I have tried various workout styles and sports, in order of appearance, more or less, they are: outdoor and treadmill jogging, indoor cylcling, frisbee, weight lifting, swimming, aerobics, yoga, pilates, spinning, ellyptical machining, American football-throwing, soccer and Tae Kwon Do. I have Yoga, swimming and some good German chocolate to thank for my recovery from two major surgeries to my abdomen after a ruptured appendix in 1996.

My workouts - consisting of a minimum of 20 minutes and a maximum of 2 hours of some activity  - have ebbed and flowed during the course of any given year, depending on what was happening in my life. It’s very telling to look back and see to what extent events such as moving, pregnancies, surgeries and giving birth had on my workout routine, and, if I can remember or have it recorded in my calendar, how my health and productivity were affected (income, social life, expenditures.) It also helps to have a significant other who shares one’s interest in working out and makes as much or more of an effort to stay in shape and battle the bulge.

Below is a table showing this year’s data thus far, as an example of how I’ve kept track of  workouts and percentages:
  

2012
Days worked out
Days in Month




January
21
31
68%
February
13
29
45%
March
18
31
58%
April
11
30
37%
May
11
31
35%
June
16
30
53%
July
13
31
42%
August
25
31
81%
September
25
30
83%
October
25
31
81%
November
0
30
0%
December
0
31
0%




Total
178
366
49%



Tune in next week for the next installment, “The Origins of the Decadethlon”!