Well... I have decided to zero my fitness streak. For several months all I did most days was take Shelby for a walk. Which yes, is exercise. But if I count that level of exercise as sufficient to maintain my streak, really my streak would be many years long at this point. And I want to be doing more. So I'm starting over to reflect that.
This past year has been stressful for me, to say the least. Mentally and emotionally draining. I let some things fall by the wayside as a result. I'm slowly but surely climbing back on the horse now.
At the beginning of October Shelby and I took our camping trip up the Bruce Peninsula. We did not end up going to visit my cousin. (She decided she was not well enough to receive visitors at this time.) So we spent two nights at Bruce Peninsula National Park and then three nights at Pinery Provincial Park instead. I took paper and pen and a French story book with me and did a small amount of work on my writing and French study each day. But mostly we slept and hiked.
My vacation hikes I do count as workouts since we did a lot of mileage, and the hikes on the Bruce were quite challenging in places. (
Here, for example, and
here, you can see a couple of the hills we hiked up on the Bruce Trail.) I was very impressed with how well Shelby did on those challenging sections! There were a couple of spots on the downhills where I lifted her down, because it was just too dangerous to let her try to jump, but she did all the uphill stuff on her own with just a couple of assists from me.
You can see more photos from our camping adventure here:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/jKpLqwanTfZRaTkn8
I also did very well with eating and sleeping on my vacation. And then fell right back into bad habits as soon as I returned home. I have been procrastinating during the day, and then staying up late (way late) at night to get my writing done. And my diet has been pretty bad. Now I can finally eat what I want when I want. And I immediately fell to eating a lot of junk. I've put a stop to that now, however. I'm not eating entirely homemade at this point, but I have cut out the salty snacks, store-bought baked goods, and other prepared foods with not the healthiest of nutrition profiles once again. I'm not tracking my food intake at this point. Just generally trying to do better.
Last month a couple of friends helped me film scenes for the intro video for the Kickstarter campaign I'm putting together for January. This consisted of my friends dressing up as zombies and pretending to attack me, while I fended them off with kicks, punches, and various other fitness exercises. I also demonstrated several different types of push-ups as an example of the different levels of exercise options I offer in the Get Fit books. I felt those push-ups in my shoulders for several days afterward! I definitely need to be doing more now to get fit for my Get Fit campaign! (Not to mention my traditional birthday workout. "53 for 53" is coming up in just over two months!) To this end, my current fitness target is to do a minimum of 15 minutes a day of actual workout activities (on top of whatever hiking I do that day--"Hiking" in the Booming Metropolis is more of a casual Sunday stroll. The terrain here is mostly flat. Not challenging at all.) Yesterday (November 11) was day 7 of my new workout streak. (I haven't done a workout yet for today. But I will!)
I have also continued my French study streak. This requires me to do a minimum of 15 minutes per day of some form of French study (could be my Fluenz program, watching French-language programming, reading/writing/speaking French, it all counts). Today, (November 12) is day 1097 for my French study streak.
On the writing front I have kept up with my "do some work on my writing every day" streak. Today was day 424 for that. But "some work" includes research, business administration stuff, studying writing craft, and practice exercises in addition to actual writing. And on many of those 424 days I only did the other, not-actual-writing tasks. Obviously I need to be creating new words on a regular basis if I want to have a writing career. And I do want to have a writing career. To this end, I am keeping my 424 day streak for now, because it represents an interesting data point for me w.r.t. recommitting to this writing thing (after having pretty much given up on it due to the stressors and other constraints on my life over the past few years), but I am also starting/working towards staring some new streaks. These are:
1. Write a minimum of 250 new story words per day. 250 words is a really small #--far too small for an average daily word count. But I need to do a lot of other things, both writing related and not, overall. So not every day is going to be a full-time writing day. On the other hand, I do think that I need to be writing every day at least a little bit. I have tried other schedules that give me days off, and they have not worked well for me. I need the momentum of writing every day. Hence the new, but really small, daily goal. Today was day 12 for this streak.
2. Because my daily minimum goal is so small, I have also set a weekly wordcount goal for new words, which is closer to the minimum writing speed I need to attain overall. That goal is 10K words per week. My weeks for tracking purposes run Mondays to Sundays, meaning today, November 12 is the last day of my week. If I hit 10K words by the end of the day today (which I am on track to do as of this writing), this week will be week #1 for this streak.
3. I have committed to improving my writing craft through focused study. To this end, I purchased recently a lifetime subscription to an online writing school. This gives me access to all of the old workshops offered by the school, in addition to the new stuff they release each month. The sum total of material is a bit overwhelming! And my tendency is actually to do too much on the study front--to watch lectures all day long and not do anything else. Hence the need to add the goals related specifically to the writing of new words. And also this streak which is tracking weeks in which I have completed at least one week's worth of study material for at least one course, including completing the corresponding assignment for that week. This week ending today is week #13.
4. I am also working up to starting a story-a-week streak. (That is: write a complete short story, from concept to completion, each week.) I'm not there yet. And this week is likely to remain week 0 at this point. (Almost certainly. The only story I started writing this week is nowhere near finished, and I have other writing work I need to get finished tonight for my coursework assignments.) I am working on building up to this, however, and hope to be ready to launch this streak by my birthday.
So, my streak summary, as of November 12:
Consecutive days of working out: 8 (hopefully!--I'll do this after submitting this post, to ensure it doesn't get missed)
Consecutive days of French: 1097
Consecutive days of writing work: 424
Consecutive days of minimum 250 new story words: 12
Consecutive weeks of writing study: 13
Consecutive weeks of minimum 10K new words: 1 (I'll get there! I'm only 360 words short as I type this.)
Consecutive weeks of story-a-week: 0
Onward!
from
Bavaria, Germany
from
Dommage que je ne sois plus à Buffalo, j'aurais pu passer te faire travailler, LOL!
my condolences to you and your mom
