Nyr

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 :-)

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

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.

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. ...