2024 Fitness Wrapped

Here's a summary of my fitness journey over the past year:

 

My loosely set goal was 400 minutes per week, but 316 minutes of exercise per week is still pretty good (an average of 45 minutes of exercise per day for the entire year). Here's a couple of notes on the numbers:

• Lifting minutes tend to be the easiest to "get." For every 60 minutes of lifting, I'm really only exercising the for maybe 20 minutes because I need adequate rest between sets.
• Running is probably the hardest effort per minute of exercise. Certainly the highest impact.
  
• I only counted walking for half the minutes. Running 60 minutes is much harder than walking 60 minutes and shouldn't reasonably be counted equal.
  
• My fitness goals changed throughout the year. I was lifting heavy to start the year, then shifted to triathlon training in the summer, then started distance running training in November.
• I counted unicycle practice under biking because it often took the place of my weekly cycling practice.
  

Here's the overall trend of my year. I first tried a line graph, but the bars looked a lot smoother:

 
I also counted the number of workouts per week (though not all workouts are equal in difficulty):

In the two above graphs, you can see a few trends. Family vacations in the summer, relentless unicycle practice in August to finish my summer goal, starting school in October (which had a big impact on my free time), a back injury + starting marathon training around November.

This is probably the ugliest of all the graphs, but here's a comparison of my lifting trend against my total cardio over the course of the year:

These Words Suck

I fight with my words.

I'd yell if I knew they could hear me.

I ask them to play nice.

But like an elusive toddler,

They point and laugh and dart out of reach,

Devoid of meaning, form, or function.

I grab my fine tooth comb.

Down to my hands and knees,

I try to trick them to say what I want.

Struggle, struggle, struggle.

Push, pull, fight.

Edit. Edit. Edit.

I curse the backspace key

And all its productive damage.

If only I could brute force the words,

Club them over the head.

But they don't respond to demands.

So I dance and woo and compliment.

Seething, I nudge them in the right direction.

Filled with loathing,

I slowly rock them to sleep.

Some day they may tell the story right,

But the colors they paint 

Never look quite right.