stats

Exercising: 2021 review

When I last wrote about exercising I found the totals quite unbelievable. I look back at those today with a smile, because the ones I now have 9 months later are even more unbelievable. So I’ll check back here in a year to see how relative this all is.

My Apple Watch is my coach

This wearable wonder of computing makes it very easy to stay on top of sports. The reminders can be annoying but useful and I noticed that I got those only when I slacked (hint, hint), which does not happen frequently. That’s how driven I am.

Monthly challenges

In 2021 I earned each of the monthly challenges, which are determined based on recent past progress and are meant to either keep you at the same level or elevate you a bit, so that at the end of the year you have improved. I wonder how big they can be after a while.

10x double move goal
180.9 km (6.5/d)
17x double move goal
30x close all rings

19x double move goals
349.5 km (11.7/d)
3695 minutes (120/d)
26700 kcal (861/d)

4220 minutes (140/d)
318.4 km (10.2/d)
27500 kcal (917/d)
4770 minutes (153/d)

Apparently there is a point after which every challenge rotates between kil(ometers), min(utes) and (k)cal.

In 2020 I earned all monthly challenges but one, which I decided not to go for (24100 kcal, or 717/d) because I knew I could not earn it even if it was the month of August.

The January 2022 challenge is to walk or run 366.7 km (11.8/d). I’m not particularly up for it but I want to do it anyway. I miss the easy challenges though.

New gear

Photo of me in the mirror wearing blue running tights, a blue sweater, and flip-flops.

I now rotate between 7 pairs of running shoes. I have also invested in some proper running outfits for chilly weather. It is to note that all of the sweaters I got were from the Men’s section. Not out of peculiarity but really because the colours are less flashy and the sizes fit me better because I have long arms.

My sidekick: Gizmo

Point of view: my dog, a yellow labrador, sitting on the ground and looking like he's smiling. My red running shoes and black leggings are visible

Gizmo is now 8 years old. He happily prances along and I’m very glad he’s with me. We both get our share of daily exercise, fresh air and adventures, and it gives me greater security to be accompanied by a muscular yellow Labrador. When it’s not too cold and we are next to a river he gets to swim too (but not in the sea because the sound of the ebb and flow scares him.)

Long gone are the days when he would lag at the end of the leash after running only 3 or 4 kilometers. We now go for 5K jogs once a week or twice, come back walking, and it’s perfectly fine. Or we just walk. Sometimes for two to three hours on the weekends, and on average for an hour and a half everyday.

Graphs

Daily average of exercise in 2021: 116 minutes (December peaked at 164 minutes per day on average)

Daily average of active energy in 2021: 773 kcal (December peaked at 996 kcal per day on average)

Daily average steps in 2021: 12340 (August peaked at 15859 steps per day on average)

Daily average running and walking distance in 2021: 10.2 km (August peaked at 13.4 km per day on average)

Activity graphs in 2021: move, exercise (both going up), stand (steady at 19)

Tallies of fitness and exercising metrics for the year 2021

Notes on the graphs

According to those tallies (generated by the excellent and free Fitness Stats iPhone app), my 2021 in sport can be broken down as follows:

711 hours of exercise (= 29.6 days, so a twelfth of the year)
3746 kilometers walked/run (whereas I drove a bit over 5000 km with my car)
… of which I ran 226 (average of 4K every week)
103 hours on the elliptical (this is equivalent to watching 123 typical TV series episodes, and guess what: that’s exactly what I did while on the elliptical)
650 workouts (on average I did almost two different activities everyday)

From an addiction to another

2021 is when I stopped smoking. I made up my mind in January or February and my strategy was to ramp up exercising, pick up an electronic cigarette, gauge if that was going to work, and carry on with the routine without smoking. That happened in May. I have not smoked since then. Woohoo!

But ramping up exercising meant that I burned more calories and therefore needed to up my food intake. Stopping smoking made me more hungry too, so I had two reasons to eat bigger portions.

I remember starting to eat as much and then a little more than my teenage boy! (Who abandoned basketball during the first year of the pandemic, and now more or less refuses to walk or hike with me even every now and then.)

I gained a lot of muscles apparently

I was a bit dismayed when I saw my weight ramp up slowly but very very steadily. It has now stabilized after 8 months or so, sometime in September.

However, my clothes continue to fit me so that means that I lost fat and gained (6 kilos of) muscles.

Weight graph for 2021: 62.42 kg on average (current trend is 63-64 kg)

Strava’s year in sport

One of the perks of being a paying subscriber of the sports tracking app Strava is the yearly report. See below.

Aside: I used to complain a lot about how that app was geared towards triathletes only. They fixed almost all the things I complained about and now it celebrates and motivates every kind of athletes, not just those who cycle, run and swim.

Cover of the 2021 year in sport report — Cover of the report

348 days active compared to 295 last year — Cover of the report

Exercising: one-year anniversary

A year ago, 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!

How it started

My dog in tow, I went for a walk. I earned my first “activity” badge. And this marked the start of my exercising daily.

iPhone screenshot: International Women’s Day challenge award, earned by completing a workout of at least 20 minutes on 8 March 2020. — International Women’s Day challenge award

The mammoth total!

In the past 365 days, I covered 1,172.78 kilometers (728.7 miles) in logged walks, or runs.

To put this into some perspective:

That’s about an eighth or a ninth of what I drive yearly.
That’s an average of almost 100 kilometers per month.
I will note that about half of it was achieved during the first five months (because that’s when I ran.)

As someone who abhorred even the idea of exercising and had stopped any practice of sport for a couple of decades, I find all of this both impressive and very gratifying.

Graphs

Bar chart of the number of exercise minutes between March 2020 and March 2021 — Daily average of exercise in the last year: 70 minutes

Bar chart of the active energy between March 2020 and March 2021 — Daily average of active energy in the last year: 547kcal

Bar chart of the number of steps between March 2020 and March 2021 — Daily average steps in the last year: 7872

Bar chart of the running and walking distance between March 2020 and March 2021 — Daily average running and walking distance in the last year: 6,4 km

Bar charts of the move, exercise and stand rings between March 2020 and March 2021 — Activity graphs in the last year: move, exercise, stand

Notes on the graphs, key stats

Except the “stand” graph which so far has been steadily increasing (spoiler: it is about to plateau at 19 times per day, or decrease. I don’t sleep so well but I’m hopeful this can improve), all of the bars of the other graphs are consistent (that’s reassuring!)

March and April last year were the slow but steady start, then in May I really upped my game. In June I probably was like, “chill if you want to sustain this.” But July, golly! July was too much. So much that a huge dip followed and it took me all of August, September and October to recover and make really small progress. I didn’t resume running though. November, December and January 2021 were tough too, with another dip and a general but consistent sluggishness. I was back at it in February. And a week into March suggests it’s going to be a pretty good month.

Notable rounded numbers include:

May 2020: walked 110 km
Jul 2020: ran 100 km (over 12 hours), covered a total walking + running distance of 175 km
Aug 2020: 15 hours of core training and yoga
Sep 2020: 42 workouts out of 60 were yoga and core training, for a total of 33 hours
Dec 2020: daily yoga practices of 40 minutes
Jan 2021: only month in the past year where I didn’t exercise every day (only 25 workouts)
Feb 2021: 1:40:00 of average walk time (13 walks, over 21 hours, over 106 km)

How it’s going

My primary motivation (beyond the Apple Watch successful nagging of exactly a year ago) was to lose the extra weight that I had put on due to some medication I took for a month or so, and to get back in shape.

In that regard it has been a complete success. Although it took eight long months to complete the former! I am back in shape: no more knee and hip pains, stronger legs and arms, slower heart rate.

Weight chart between March 2020 and March 2021 showing a steep decrease between february and december from 68 to 58 kilos, and then a small rise again under 60. — Weight graph over the last year: 62.09 kg

But what keeps me going is this: exercising is now a key part of my life. I swear I never thought I would think that! I still can’t wrap my head around it 🙂 but it’s true. This is the only thing I do for myself. This is the only thing I do that is not working, or caring for my child or relatives (both of which, with a little sleep, a little Netflix, or a little art making or reading, fill the rest of my life.)

My other website behind the curtain

I’ve been editing the W3C website for a few decades now (gasp!) and in leading its redesign from the 2008 design, I am learning an astounding amount of new things about it! Here are some of the things I know about it.

Illustration of a spotlight lighting a man running, graphs and a book

Spotlight on the W3C website

In the 21 years I’ve been with the W3C, I remember only 3 different designs, the current one dates from a decade ago. Redesigning our website is crucial to improve the overall experience of those who depends on our Web standards work.

The website is managed by W3C itself and has been up for three decades. It currently contains over 2 million web pages. They’re static HTML or built in Perl, PHP, come from WordPress or are custom built using Symfony.

Illustration showing a woman at her computer leaning against stacked objects adorned with a gear

Tech stack summary

Debian Linux
Apache is used for serving the static content
MySQL for database storage
Varnish HTTP Cache is used for full-page caching
HAProxy is used for load balancing
There are over 3,700 Apache .htaccess files with different rewrite rules

Illustration showing hands at a keyboard in front of a screen

Hosting & content

In a large-scale hosting setup, there are around 100 servers running Linux Debian on OpenStack, of which 20 to 30 servers are related to the primary website.

Web content is stored mostly in CVS and databases via CMS tools (WordPress, Symfony), and secondarily in GitLab and GitHub.

Most content is managed as static HTML edited locally (e.g. emacs, vi, BlueGriffon) and committed into CVS repositories using CVS clients, the terminal or HTTP PUT or WebDAV. Or, content is generated dynamically using Symfony or statically via makefiles, XML and XSLT.

25 instances of WordPress power the W3C Blog (over 950 posts) and W3C News (over 4,200 items), but also our Talks, working groups blogs, a test site, and W3C Community and Business Groups.

Illustration of an alien beamed by a UFO

The W3C Homepage

The current homepage of the W3C website is a mix of HTML snippets which usually appears elsewhere on the W3C site, generated via XML, XSLT, PHP and other tools:

The News items are read from WordPress
- The “homepage news” category determines what to show on the W3C homepage; we typically show up to 9 entries
- The “top story” category determines which news item is expanded on the W3C homepage; we prefer to feature one, but have at times shown two or more
The right-hand side shows the last three posts from the W3C Blog
W3C Member Testimonials rotate from a database
The Events and Talks are shown from a Symfony app and WordPress respectively
The search bar links to an external DuckDuckGo search (that we chose for its good reputation for data privacy)
The rest is static

Markup errors in any of the source files will likely “break” the homepage. On average, I break the homepage 10% of the time!

2020: midlife

I am going to turn 45 this year and I think I might be at midlife. More and more I feel it.

I can’t say it’s because of the salt and pepper in my hair because that crept up on me several years ago. It isn’t either the wrinkles on my forehead and round my eyes – those came as I was raising my toddler. No, I am referring to physical signs that started last year :

Vision (1): my left eye now scores 10/10 while the right one remains at 12/10.
Vision (2): I used to see clearly real close (15 cm) but I now see clearly a little less close (20 cm). I continue to see clear real far.
Knee: my right knee aches now and then.
Right leg: I now can barely sit cross-legged and can most definitely no longer sit in the lotus position.
Periods: I’ve had only 4 inconsistent periods last year and none this year so far. I experience the unpleasant hot flashes almost every evening and at night.
Weight gain: unfortunately, another aspect of menopausal transition was weight gain. Far from being chubby, I rapidly gained enough weight (8 kilos or 16 pounds) that I had to put away a few of my favourite pants and skirts that were a strict size 36 (FR) or 4 (US), that the inside of my thighs now nearly touch each other, and that I have “love handles” (and no one to handle them but this is all right.)

There were also some hard realizations: people no longer call me miss, I have celebrated 21 years with my current employer, I can no longer learn as well and as fast as before.

What am I doing about it?

It took me a while to put two and two together, for starters, and to work on a plan.

I have a minimal plan of action to close all of my activity rings as much as possible. My smart watch sees that I do, although I’ve had it seven months so you could say it took me a while to make a plan. Better late than never!

screenshot of the apple watch showing the three activity rings closed

New Coralie exercises and tonight was the fourth day I jogged. I go with my dog who runs about four times more (and most times ends up splashing in the river along which we run). I run and walk for 20 or 30 minutes. Every evening so far I have run more than the previous day. This is encouraging! I’m keen on making steady progress.

That is all.

October 2020 update

I took this exercising plan very seriously and now it’s part of my daily routine \o/

How did it work?

I became addicted rather quickly, thankfully, because otherwise this would not have been a thing at all!
The other thing that helped was that I was also very curious and enthusiastic about my rapid and steady progress, therefore I was motivated.
And lastly, I set myself up for success: only non-ambitious goals, realistic expectations, and achievable plans. In practice for me it meant it had to be easy enough to do that I would not give up. For example, taking the dog out for a walk or run was good for me too. Or walking to the beach to eat a picnic. Or doing yoga or core training in the comfort of my living room, following a YouTube video series (yoga with Adriene, in my case).

It took me 6 months to lose that extra weight (it was in the vicinity of 10 kilos —20 pounds). some time in September I was able to put my favourite trousers again \o/

But there were other benefits that I discovered early on: more strength in the core, legs and arms, more mobility. Two concrete examples:

When I started running I needed knee braces, especially for the right knee. That knee had been giving me grief for a few years and I didn’t think it could be fixed, but gaining strength did! After less than a month, I could feel the braces were no more useful. Since then, I no longer have knee pains, ever.
My right hip gained mobility after a few months and I was able again to sit in cross-legged position without needing to lift up my leg to ease the pain. I now no longer have hip pain.

March:
Workouts: 30
Time: 15:06 (average: 00:30)
Kcal: 4579 (average: 152)
Runs: 19
Walk: 10
Fitness: 1

April:
Workouts: 63
Time: 26h59 (average: 00:25)
Kcal: 7622 (average: 120)
Runs: 26
Walk: 18
Fitness: 18

May:
Workouts: 79
Time: 45h21 (average: 00:34)
Kcal: 11797 (average: 149)
Runs: 23
Walk: 31
Fitness: 25

June:
Workouts: 54
Time: 35h15 (average: 00:39)
Kcal: 9200 (average: 170)
Runs: 16
Walk: 14
Fitness: 24

July:
Workouts: 67
Time: 45h12 (average: 00:40)
Kcal: 12451 (average: 185)
Runs: 18
Walk: 14
Fitness: 35

August:
Workouts: 46
Time: 23h02 (average: 00:30)
Kcal: 4764 (average: 103)
Runs: 4
Walk: 7
Fitness: 35

September:
Workouts: 60
Time: 35h14 (average: 00:35)
Kcal: 7312 (average: 121)
Runs: 4
Walk: 13
Fitness: 43