Somehow I missed the fourth anniversary, two weeks ago, of my exercising daily 🤷🏻 It’s probably become so much part of my life now that I don’t pay as much attention to the day it all started in 2020.
After 8 March 2020, everyday I closed my activity rings and exercised daily.
That 8 March 2020, my Apple Watch suggested that it wasn’t too late if I wanted to earn the 2020 International Women’s Day challenge: all it took was a 20-minute walk! My dog in tow, I went for a walk. I earned my first “activity” badge. And this marked the start of my exercising daily.
I often joke that I exercise everyday otherwise if I stopped I wouldn’t take it up again. I think it’s true. But at the same time it really matters to me to be that person now. For most of my life I hated exercise and sports, and didn’t care at all for the benefits it brings. I am no longer that person.
I combine things in my life in a way that I can work out when I need to go somewhere (e.g., to run errands, go shopping, visit a friend, go to the doctor, etc.), and take photos which I really like. It takes time, so I plan for this in my work days or the weeks my kid is with me. But also, I combine working out with other things like listening to podcasts, catching up on social media, or watching TV series (my elliptical bike is in my room).
Today marks 12 months of e-road cycling and e-mountain biking for me! and tomorrow will mark 12 months since I got my own eMTB (pictured below).
Nakamura e-summit 950
3011 kilometers, shown in orange on the SportsTracker map!
Map of the area showing in various shades of orange the area I have covered on my eMTB. It goes as far as Fréjus and Roquebrune in the Var at the West, Mons, Caussols and Gréolières at the North and Saint-Laurent du Var at the East.
Most of it was recreational but a lot of it was a substitute to driving for errands and commute, or to meet people.
I think (*) I have driven fewer kilometers than I cycled in the last year, as a result.
I enjoy myself biking way more than anything else. I’m not very good at it but I don’t care. I’m not very bad at it either!
Biking makes me happy and I look happy on a bike. I selected from the last 12 months a few pictures of me (taken mostly by my co-biker, former colleague and friend Daniel) that I like in particular.
Today was a very lazy Sunday. I’m aching all over! Mostly, my legs are stiff and my arms feel heavy. A few days ago my legs were stiff and my shoulders were screaming from trying a different kind of push-ups. So today I woke up several times during the night and the morning, and finally got up late after “third sleep”.
Gif: camera zooming on a cat resting on its back on a couch, propped on a pillow.
Be that a coincidence or not, yesterday evening I read articles about biphasic sleep. For millennia and up until the Industrial Revolution such a sleep pattern (the kind where nighttime sleep is split into two segments) was the common pattern: people would fall asleep some time after dark for two to four hours, wake up refreshed for a few hours to do stuff, and go back to sleep for a few more hours until around dawn. (I enjoyed reading about this subject particularly in this BBC article.)
I am reassured there is an explanation to the middle-of-the-night insomnia, although it makes me angry that our society prefers to shame us into thinking it’s wrong and against the interests of how we’ve organised the school and work lives of our fellow humanlings and humans.
As to what is causing my body fatigue, I am not sure. Nothing obvious, that is. I went from no exercise to daily exercise but that was 3 years ago. There was a time period where my daily exercising average was over the top (nearly 3 hours every day on average) but right now it’s been about 90 minutes every day on average for about a year.
Screenshot of the Health app showing the exercise minutes between september 2022 and september 2023: Gradual decrease from 125 minutes per day on average in September 2022 to about 60 in January 2023, then rather stable around 70 until August 2023 where the bar goes over 100. Daily average for the period rounded to 86 minutes per day.
It could be a combination of the heatwaves we’ve been having these past few months (hot nights never under 24°C/75F and blazingly hot days in the range of 30-35°C/86-95F which feels like way more given the humidity), and some intense workouts.
This week for example I discovered a particularly wicked 10-minute “functional strength” total body workout by Greg Cook on Fitness+ that is done only with body weight which killed me! Squats where you never fully stand up between each repetition, walkout pushups, and lateral lunges. This week I also rode my bike as far as its battery could take me (with the hills to climb, that’s about 65 km/40 mi).
Could be that work is stressful (and has been a kind of different stressful for about a year) and adding this to the mix probably explains the fatigue.
I broke my “move” streak the other day for the first time in 908 days, and didn’t close my “exercise” ring in time. I noticed after work when to my surprise it was already the next day (and had been for an hour) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I did exercise on what to me felt like that day, but that counted for the next day.
Assuming I close my “move” ring everyday, the next time I get the “longest move streak” award is Wednesday, August 20, 2025.
