As an active, outdoorsy, geeky, and nerdy individual who gobbles up medical studies and gear reviews nearly every single day, I have oddly never made a real record of my athletic activities. Off and on I have dabbled with the MapMyFitness sites to help figure out how far I ran or what the elevation profile was for a bike ride, but not with any serious intention to keep it up to date or analyze the data later. In my own way I was being a purist with my belief that the activity itself is the worthier part than any sort of personal record or achievement. My little stab at applying Kantian moral philosophy to athletics. Gods, I just typed that out and rolled my own eyes at it. ::slow applause::

For reasons I cannot really fathom, part of me issued a proclamation stating that 2016 Shall be the Year That Activities Shall be Tracked. At the end of December, I sat down and created a spreadsheet for January with a row for every single day and columns for my common outdoorsy or athletic activities. And, to my own surprise, I actually started keeping a record of most everything I did in that spreadsheet. I also downloaded the Strava app onto my phone to help track my runs and bike rides. While the Strava app's data is detailed and fascinating, I have been far less diligent with using it as I do not enjoy carrying it on shorter runs or rides when I do not have a backpack. A watch with GPS capabilities might be nice in the future.

A copy of the current spreadsheet data is below, thanks to Google Drive. I have a Numbers document that I have been using locally the past few months but the iCloud sharing webpage is godawful slow when rendering the spreadsheet, so I just pulled my Numbers document into Google and fixed a dozen or so formatting issues. May have to switch to using Google Drive completely if I continue sharing this data publicly. Bugger.

After I made the Compiled table, I noticed a pretty substantial data oversight. While I am keeping track of time for activities like running, biking and weights, I am completely skipping it for things like swimming, snowshoeing, and alpine touring. Swimming is easily calculable thanks to me being pretty consistent at a 30 minute mile at the moment. Alpine touring and snowshoeing would have to be educated guesses based on my remembrance of the day and any photos I took during the activity. Back of the napkin workings have me missing about 35 hours worth of time.

So, after 14 weeks, what do I see here? Apparently, I am averaging about 9.3 hours of exercise per week. If you consider that I normally take two rest days per week and took an entire week off at the beginning of March, that means on days I exercise, I average two hours of activity. Not too shabby.

Comparing February and March, it is quite apparent that I slashed my running in order to start swimming and also head outside for some biking, hiking, and alpine touring. What is not immediately apparent is that the shorter runs I did in March were done a bit faster, resulting in me pulling off an 8:30/mile pace during a trail run today, which is a minute faster than my average time in February.

One rather embarrassing statistic is my time spent stretching. 460 minutes in January, 295 minutes in February, but only 85 minutes in March. Not a good trend. Need to work on that in April.

Is it worth having this information? I suppose it really depends on my aims for all of this activity. I call it training but I am not really training for anything in particular. I would not mind finally running all of Wildwood in one go and I do have a dream of climbing both Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams in one day (why? fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory). Neither of those two things are really motivating me to head out though and swimming is not exactly helpful with mountaineering, I suspect. Honestly, I simply like knowing that I am in shape enough to handle nearly any activity I can throw at my body. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Going to keep on tracking though, maybe add a few more columns in for things like pace and power output. Also considering a heart rate monitor as it is all the rage now for serious athletic training and I am a bit curious to know what that cold, dark cinder in my chest is doing while I am headed up yet another hill.

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Later: While walking back from Palio tonight (1.5 miles from the house), it occurred to me that I made no mention of all the walking I do. Looking at my iPhone's Health app, it looks like I average around 2.5 miles of walking every single day. Today alone I walked 8 miles during my travels to food carts and tea/coffee shops. I do not really consider this exercise per se, instead it is a key part of my recovery strategy. Walking helps loosen up my body after strenuous activity and it also helps me mentally relax, especially on these beautiful spring days. I definitely think it contributes to how well my body puts up with the strain I put on it.