20 minutes

Well, I officially hit year 3 5 days ago, and forgot all about it. Not because I'm not exercising any more, but because it's just a habitual thing I think about every day.

I hit a year at CSU in February (yeah.. I now know lots about .NET) and have ridden my bike to work every day except day one. So most of my exercise has been biking around town. On days when I can't find some distant errand to run, I take the long way home to stretch out the time it takes.

On weekends I generally take the dog for a run. I did a 5k the other day and counted that. It was kind of fun. I signed up for another one in April.

Anyway, not a lot to say. My weight has stayed rather stable around 135-150.. Since my wife has been pregnant and I've taken to consuming her leftovers, I hit 145. : ) I'm not sure what I'm going to do about a workout on the day the baby is born.. that one will be tough to negotiate..

Here are the numbers again:

And here's a link to the other posts about this

Well, I rolled around to a whole year of the bike commute and forgot all about it. Like most things if you do it long enough it's a habit.

Here are the numbers:

Those are pretty averaged.. I think my mileage is quite a bit more than that.

I was working on the bike the other day and wondering why I'm having to replace crap all the time... It didn't occur to me that I'd been riding it more than a year, and that for this winter at least, it's been parked outside during my 9-5. : (

Anyway, not much to say. I never drove to work. Even to the point of riding in, then riding home to get my car so I could make it to appointments out of town, etc.

I rode in all kinds of weather, and only wussed once or twice. We had one day when I woke up and windchill was at -30 or so.. I worked from home for the morning and went in at noon.

Oh, I also had one sick day, which suuuucked.. I felt fine in the morning, and had to pedal my ass home at around 11 with a massive headachey fever thing. I puked in a creek by my house.

I love my bike.

So I made it my goal to ride to work every day ever since I started my job in February. It's been interesting. The winter was practically easier than summer heat. (and it's only gotten to about 85 around here) Business casual dress + 5 miles a day on a bike make for a not totally nasty, but funkier than average Aaron sometimes.

Anyway, the other reason I really wanted to post this is to test out google's spreadsheet embedding in html. Here are my calculations about the commute:

Google's becoming pretty fracking impressive. It's a pretty fun time to be an html fluent webmonkey.

Back to the commute for a bit, I was surprised to see that had I driven my car that whole time, I would have only saved about 17 gallons of gas (as of 6/10). Here I was telling my wife that all the money I've been spending on my bike has been offsetting lots of expensive fuel.. bummer.

note:
The commute stretches over to mountain Ave on the way home so it can end up being a good 20 minutes of excercise. Some days I go straight home, some days I go much further.. so it's just an attempt at an average.

So as I mentioned in my previous post, I've been doing this thing where I exercise in some fashion for no less than 20 minutes every day. I hit 2 years over a week ago, and it was more or less a non-event. The 20 minutes thing has gone from something i'm 'doing' to just something I do. It's habit. I think about it every day, and I just do it.

I got a cubicle job in February at CSU, and because I'm a strange man with strange goals, I had to set up a new one related to this job. I'll never drive to work. I plan to ride my bike, regardless of weather for a year. I'm up to 2 months. I've ridden in slushy muck, rainy snow, etc. So far so good. (I'll blog about what I've learned on that subject here too.)

The point is, that ride (about 2.5 miles) each way has become my average workout. I run less than I used to. I also go climbing with my brother every week, and go to yoga with my lovely wife and friends. So really, the 20 minutes thing has gotten rather easy. I have so many regular opportunities and exercise commitments that I sometimes forget I'm still doing it.

I haven't recorded my workouts in quite a while. (the runs are still tracked on my gps) So I don't have many stats to give. Again, the weakest workout I've had was counting a brisk walk or two. But on average, I'm still the fittest I've ever been, though I'm probably getting a bit less cardio than I did last year. My weight is still holding around 135-140.

The point is, after 6 months or so, it just becomes habit. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

The Numbers:

It all started with my brother. He was Looking for a way to overcome his training slump so he came up with the idea that he would do at least 20 minutes of exercise every day. No breaks, no weekends, no time off.

That was on 2/26/2006. He told me about it, and I thought about it for a while.. almost a month. and started doing it (albeit a bit differently) on 3/19/2006. Yesterday was my 365th day. (I went running)

The Plan:

So, basically, the plan is simple. Work out in some fashion every day, for at least 20 minutes. See how long you can keep going at that.

Like anything else.. your mileage may vary, you get out what you put in, etc etc.. In my experience, I *rarely* exceeded the 20 minute minimum by much, as I was generally in a hurry to get back to the other things I had going on in my life, but the net total is more than I've ever regularly exercised in my entire life, so I call that a win. Just the fact that I had a goal and something to lose if I didn't keep going, kept me going.

By contrast, my brother, who started this mess has maintained an average over an hour, but he's got things to train for. I just wanted to stay in shape and get a start on beating back my 30's metabolism.

Results

I've worn out a couple pairs of running shoes. Running is the simplest activity that I found I could do absolutely anywhere I found myself. My GPS says I did 597 Miles. (95 hours running, 65,000 calories burned.)

I've done Lots of strange and generally pretty fun things in search of something to count.

I've been running in 3 or 4 different states, early in the morning and late at night, semi-drunk and sober. I went for a run on the morning of my wedding day, while traveling in New Mexico, and on the docks around Baltimore.