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 2^nd 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.