2016 New Year Resolutions Review

The year comes to a close and it is time to see what happened to my New Year Resolutions.

Yoga Everyday

Well, this didn't go so well. Overall I managed about every second day, though I have done most of it in the first half of the year. But it turned into a habit now, so I tend to do it a few times a week.

Cycling Mini Adventures 

I managed to do quite a few and had fun doing them.

• GFNY Barcelona
• Gran Fondo Mussara
• La Ruta Minera
• Tour de France weekend in Andorra
• Long solo weekend trip around Ripoll
• Geocentrum 2
• and a few solo rides to places around Barcelona

Draw something every day

This turned out to be pretty much a failure. While it was going good at the beginning of the year I just gave up after a while. It was just impossible to find the time or inspiration to draw.

Blog once a month

Nearly...this should be number 11 for the year.

12 Books

It was a difficult start, but then I found some easy to read thriller series and space operas and ended up reading 23 books.

Some more goals ... 

During the year I picked up a few more smaller goals and habits where I have been more or less successful.

I had the cycling goal of reach 8000km for the year and achieve all Strava Climbing and Gran Fondo challenges. But an illness in December made this impossible. So I just got 11 of the 12.

I also started to do Vegetarian Mondays with a 64% success rate. I found it difficult when traveling or when there were social events.

I worked on my Spanish with Duolingo for most of the year and finished all the lessons. You have to keep it up though so you don't loose it again.

And I reached my goal weight. The remaining fat has somehow to be replaced by muscles.

Of to the next year...

I haven't quite decided on anything yet, but I definitely take it a lot more easy :-)

La Ruta Minera

Mauro talked me into taking part in the La Ruta Minera sportive, conveniently he broke his collarbone before and didn't join.

On paper this looked like a lot of fun. It is a bit shorter than Gran Fondo La Mussara and a "bit" more climbing.

The event starts and finishes in Berga, which is an hour away with the car. There is no good rail connection, so I rented a car for the long weekend.
I booked a hotel through the sportive organisation from Friday to Sunday, with the race being on Sunday. The Hotel HCC Ciutat de Berga was nothing special, but the front desk was very friendly and he did the sportive last year. He even checked out my gears to make sure I was not trying with a 11-25 cassette. They allowed bikes in the rooms for this weekend and also provided extra early breakfast and late checkout on Sunday.

Saturday was for relaxing and sight seeing. The old town of Berga is pretty and for the nerds they have the only Free Software Street in the world.





Sunday the race. I felt good. I had stuffed myself with pasta the previous days. I had water and gels. The bicycle was mostly OK (some problems with the bearings in the front wheel). All systems go.

Maybe the uphill start should have given me a clue, but the temperature was nice and so was the landscape. The first climb was easy to manage around 600m of climbing. But the second one already took most out of me, 1000m of climbing with one ramp of 23% gradient.
Distance wise this was only the halfway point and lots of climbing remained.

Before the next big climb the temperature went up to 37C with nearly no tree coverage. On the last hill the heat took everything out of me. I stopped a few times in the shadow just to cool down again.

The finish line obviously was also a climb. Overall there were only two sections that were flat and allowed me to slipstream a bit.
That my descending sucks also didn't really help.

But ... I did finish and it is a beautiful area of Catalunya. The organisation was also lovely, it felt like a big family. There were less than 600 cyclists taking part, which is a lot less than my previous sportives.

I am probably not going to try this again, but will visit the area when it is a bit cooler :-)

Some more photos in my google photo album.

Half Time for New Year Resolutions

Half a year is over and it is time to see how my New Year Resolutions are going.

Yoga Everyday

Pretty well I would say. Since I started tracking it with HabitBull I have done it in three of four days. I found it harder when traveling or with days where I have work and evening events. But I am happy with this so far.

Cycling Mini Adventures 

I didn't put a number on this, but I was imagining something like about once a month. I had to cancel the Velothon Berlin because of work. But I did some other stuff.

• GF Barcelona, I am not this counts, it was pretty bad
• Gran Fondo Mussarra - brilliant
• Monestir de Sant Miquel del Fai solo ride, very pretty
• Rocacorba climb near Girona, small BRCG group
• Looking for snow in Monteseny
• Montserrat Balconies solo ride, quite hard

This month a trip to Andorra and Berga.

Draw something every day

90% success in drawing something, the number for recognizable things is lower.

Blog once a month

If you count this one for last month I am fine.

12 Books

This was ambitious, it it got worse before it got better.

• The Girl on the Train - very nice, I read this very fast
• Remote - rubbish, a string of fortune cookie texts
• Ordinary Thunderstorms, good start - bad middle - no end
• Seveneves - I gave up, this must be the most boring book in the world. It is like watching the paint dry, where you already know which part drys first.
• The Expanse 1-5 - I found this through goodreads, it is a very simple space opera with some nice ideas and characters. Now I have to wait until the author writes more books.

So I am doing good so far, it can only get worse...

Track Everything

I like to track stuff. I think it has always been like this. 

But later I realized that this can also be useful to achieve goals and discover problems. Because we are very bad at noticing patterns over longer periods of time. 

We might step on the weight scale every morning and see that it varies up and down a kilogram, at least if we can remember what it said yesterday. But this is not how your weight changes, it changes very slowly over a long period of time and unless you write it down you won't notice.

Writing it down is one thing, but you really only see what is going on if you visualize it with some kind of graph. 

As I am not only into tracking stuff, but also pretty lazy, keeping log of all kind of values would never work without the support of gadgets, mobile and web applications. So today I will list some that I am using at the moment.

Habitbull

Firstly HabitBull, this is the newest app I am using. It is basically a check-list of your goals or habits, that you can check off every day. It will give you some graphs and tells you if you break the chain. 

I use it to track my new year resolutions, but also some other habits I am trying to acquire like "use duolingo to learn Spanish every day". Duolingo has its own reminders, tracking and graphs, but it is nice to have it all in one app and to keep an overview this way. 

The nice feature of this app compared to others is that you can track events that should happen every day, or a number of times every month. This is what I use for blog posts and books: require one per month.

You can also track habits which require a certain number per day, for example to track your weight or a number of pull-ups.

I am paying for the premium version, because that one allows syncing to the cloud. It doesn't work well, but it is good enough for backups.

The biggest problem with Habitbull is that it is region restricted on the Google Play Store, and they don't allow users in Spain. Luckily I was able to use my work account to download and pay for it. But I wonder why companies take these kind of rubbish decisions.

resting heart rate

sleep

Next: fitbit, this is probably the most known and used tracking app. I bought a fitbit Charge HR specifically to track my resting heart rate. Currently I don't have enough data for comparison, but it the future it should give me an indication when I am sick or generally exhausted. 

I also use the device to track my sleep, which is not so important at the moment. But last year I had a phase where I was very tired for a long time and it turned out that I averaged only five hours sleep a night. 

And finally I also use it to track general steps and energy output when not doing sports. I try to do 12000 steps on the days when I don't use the bicycle. 

Nutrition: Macros

Nutrition: Calories

Myfitnesspal I just started using and it is probably just temporary.

It is probably the best app to do food logging. Which always will be annoying as you have more or less guess the amounts and sizes of the food you are eating,, unless you just eat ready-meals, which you shouldn't.

The main things I learned so far are:
- snacks make 30% of my calories intake (!)
- most of my calories come from carbohydrates

Myfitnesspal is also very good to integrate all kind of other applications like fitbit, Strava, Withings, Google Fit, ...
My current plan is to use it maybe two more months and hope to have reduced my snacking by then.


To track my general weight I use a fitbit wifi scale, so I don't have to enter the values manually. As I mentioned above: tracking weight can be very difficult if you don't have good visualization.
The graphs from fitbit are pretty bad as they don't have a average or trend line.
Much better is trendweight, which is a free website supporting the fitbit and withings wifi scales. It has very nice graphs and tries to make predictions like "You will reach your goal weight in June 2018".

The graph is only part of my history, but you can see that something happened in January 2015 (I broke my collarbone) and that 2015 generally was not very successful.

These are the apps I use for general daily tracking, but there are some more specific to sports, app usage and to-do lists.
But this should be enough for today.

Yoga

As I have mentioned in my New Year Resolutions 2016 post I have started doing yoga.

The main reasons for this are:

The meditation part
Some of the sessions are so relaxed that you fall asleep and even if your mind is racing at the beginning of a practice, after a few minutes you get distracted by doing stuff. In that aspect it is like cycling for me, getting out of your head and into your body. Breathing exercises are a big part of this.

The stretching bit
Yoga is mostly about getting into positions your body doesn't want to be in. At least my body doesn't want to be twisted like that.
Sitting on my desk most of the day and then sitting on the bicycle a bit more has resulted in myself being very inflexible. The result of this is a bad back and problems with all kind of joints.
I did some physiotherapy for my back a long time ago and when I broke my collarbone. The exercises are very similar to some yoga poses. So I am just going to pretend that they work.

The workout stuff
This I just discovered after a few practices. Apparently I should have some muscles I didn't know about. I am mostly talking about the mystical core one hears about so much.

Disclaimer: I am the first to admit that I was not a big fan of yoga. I saw it as something people do that don't want to do a proper sport and can be done lying down. And it isn't about yoga, you can have the same result with other sports. But the Kata style helps, it gives you a pattern to adhere to.

So how did I start? On YouTube obviously. Because I am not quite up to embarrassing myself in front of a group of pros.

One of the cycling channels I am subscribed to had some Yoga For Cyclists videos and it is a good starting point.
It also helps that it shows a few inflexible guys in sweatpants trying to keep up with a yoga teacher.

This got me going and after a few other videos I got myself a mat and practised once in a while.

For the New Year Resolutions I picked a video series which is very easy and very chilled (at times too chilled), that provided a video for every day of January. I haven't managed to keep up, I am on 22 of 30 now. There are bits with mantras and affirmation I choose to ignore.

 

I am already noticing a slight improvement in flexibility and the position of my shoulders when on the road bike.

But it is early days and lets see if I can keep it up.

New Year Resolutions 2016

It's that time of the year, when everyone makes empty promises to themselves. And I don't want to skip this important tradition. The last one I did was in 2012, which seems like a long time ago.

Usually these are along the lines of sporty stuff or loosing weight. I have already stopped drinking alcohol and coffee end of last year and I am doing two hours of activity (as tracked by google fit) already. And nobody will stop me cycling too much anyway.

There are also some things I promise I won't do this year: going vegan, stop gluten intake or low-carb.

Still, some of these might be unexpected.

2012 New Year's Resolutions

It is that time of the year again where I make up stuff to ignore for the following twelve months. Last year I didn't do it, but this year I will give it another try.
I has been pointed out that these kind of resolutions doesn't really fit into the agile way of making decisions that I do subscribe to in my professional life. I will again try to make follow up posts to check how I am doing during the year and possibly adjust the goals.

So here we go.

No Screen Day -- don't spend any time in front of a screen or phone for one day a week. This can't be avoided for work, but everything else is forbidden. I am going to start with a low use day, like Tuesdays and then increase it to a day with more free time like Fridays or possibly two weekdays.

Sort out Fedora -- I am behind with my work on Fedora packages. This has to do with a lack of time, but also with the direction Fedora is taking, which has killed my motivation a bit. First I will catch up with all the work and then decide if I give up on maintaining the packages and switch to CentOS and let other people do the work. If I give up on Fedora there are other open source project where I could invest more time.

Cook new stuff -- I love cooking, but often I just rehash old recipes or do one of these "whatever is in the fridge" meals. So plan for this year: pick a new recipe every week and cook it on the weekend.

Now you are probably wondering where the usual stuff is. You know, the bits about weight and sports. I see those as a given anyway. I will continue to do more mountain biking and running and eat well enough to not end on the very lardy side.
I will hopefully also progress on my career without having to do major changes.

As these are pretty easy goals I might add harder ones or follow Cutts example in his quest to do a new thing every month and stay with it if it turns out to be nice.

btw: I shouldn't have told you this. 

2010 Triannually New Year's resolutions update

This year I am doing the updates every four months and April is nearly over, so here it goes.

1. Loose weight: going very well. I dropped from an average weight of 79 to 74.7kg and moved from "overweight" to "normal weight" BMI category. I didn't my lifestyle too much, I just eat and snack a bit less. One big helper has been the physics diet website, which keeps a nice average graph and helps me to stay motivated. I just have to go another 1.7kg to reach my goal for the year.

2. Reduce time spend watching TV, reading e-mails, blogs, facebook and twitter. I reduced the number of RSS feeds from 600 to 479 and the posts I read per day from 365 to 240 (including tweets). And I spend less time on each post, as I use readitlater to mark interesting posts and read them when I have time for it. I also stopped watching a few TV shows and stopped using facebook. Overall I notice that I have more time and I am sure I can do a bit more in the next eight months. Using GTD more also helped with my time management. 

3. Do something about my so called "career". This could mean doing something more fun, working less and/or earning more money. As mentioned in the previous post, I have decided to go for something more fun with a job at softonic. I will judge how it turned out in the coming months. For some reason I seem to have too many choices at the moment.

Maybe I should have chosen more goals, but the success so far seems to be an indicator that it is good to concentrate on a few. Next update will be at the end of August.

Some left overs from last year, which I worked on this year too:

• I did travel to a new place: Marrakesh
• I did get an ITV for my motorbike and use it more
• I use my mountain bike a lot more

2010 New Year's resolutions

by boite-en-valise

A new year means new resolutions. But first a quick look back at the ones from last year.

On the fail side: I didn't loose weight, neither did I use my motorcycle more or took a lot more advantage of Barcelona. Success on: sorting out my music collection, travelling somewhere new, doing more programming and blogging a bit more.

Now to the next year. I read a bit about these kind of resolutions and how to be better in succeeding. I probably took too much on in the last year and it is better to have some way of quantifying success or failure. So this year I am just taking on three resolutions. I still keep the failed ones from last year in the back of my mind though.

1. Loose weight (again), but this time with a plan. I will try to loose 0.5 kg a month. On the one hand it doesn't seem a lot on the other hand loosing 6 kg in a year seems too much. I will keep track of this and also keep track about my sport activities. To achieve the goal I will have to reduce my lunches with the opus5 guys and increase my sport activities. I will swap my gym for one nearer to my flat. I also will stop eating sweets and snacks.

2. Reduce time spend watching TV, reading e-mails, blogs, facebook and twitter. I will unsubscribe from as many services as possible. Instead I will spend the time programming, cooking, reading, socializing and doing sports. Not sure how I will put that in numbers, as I don't have them for the past, but I will make something up.

3. Do something about my so called "career". This could mean doing something more fun, working less and/or earning more money. Either at opus5, new projects in my free time or something completely new. I will have to see what comes up, but I have twelve months to decide.

Another look at my New Year resolutions. I decided to do them every four months now, every three was a bit much.

loose weight
fail - I am doing more mountain biking and eat sensible, but I gave up on the gym. Working out with my N79 Active turned out to be a lot of fun.

use my motorcycle more
a little bit more use, small trips and some usage in town. Now I need to get a new ITV.

sort out my music collection
all done. Tapes and CDs are digitized and I got rid of most of the duplicates. Music from podcasts is still a mess, but that can wait for another day.

travel somewhere new
Success - We went to Cadiz for the summer holiday and also checked out Tarifa, Tangier and Gibraltar. I would like to do another weekend trip somewhere, either with the bike or a weekend plane trip.

do more programming
not much happening at work. I started the twitter / tractor top10 website, which was fun. I also took over some packages for Fedora and have two more on review. I also did some programming for the digitization of the tapes and little things on older projects. I would count that as a success.

take more advantage of Barcelona
Saw some arty film stuff, went to the beach more and took full advantage of Tibidabo. Also two trips to the cinema so far: Watchmen and District 9, which are both great. This week is Merce and soon the Air Show and the Red Bull Air Race.

blog more
a little bit better. I think once every two weeks is probably my rhythm :-)