Let's Fight (our) Mediocrity, One Round at a Time!
All in Health
I love running for the almost meditative effects that it has on me. At the same time, I hate that I run so depressingly slow.
In my twenties my times were actually not too bad. Not enough for competitive ambitions but not too shabby either. A mere decade later my running times have deteriorated massively, and just getting below the 1h for 10km again was a massive battle. In past years I often wondered what exactly caused the breakdown of my running abilities. So let's take a look.
While doing some background research for my recent article on cold shock therapy and my cold shower challenge, I stumbled upon the first commercial cryo chamber in Hong Kong, which had just opened its doors in April of this year. Obviously I had to follow in Joe Rogan’s Bigfoot-sized footsteps and had to give it try.
This is the quarterly check-in on the goals from my New Year's resolution. Just as a reminder, the idea was to choose targets that fulfill the S.M.A.R.T criteria: being specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-related. By making my goals public and checking-in regularly with you out there, I hoped to keep me motivated over the year to achieve all goals for 2016. And just in case this is not enough, I added a punishment on top, promising to go to work in original Bavarian Lederhosen on the first working day in 2017 if I miss more than one of the six goals for the year. Still pretty scary! So let's see where I am at the half-year mark of 2016.
Quantified Self is, in many ways, the antidote to the trend of “big data”. Big data accumulates, averages and tries to generate recipes for the masses. QS in contrast analyzes the single individual, trying to identify what works for one particular person.
One of the more technical exercises I did in my eternal journey to understand myself was getting my DNA analyzed. In this Life-Sparring round I share my experience and give a first glimpse of the findings.
I am somewhat of a quantified self (QS) nut. For many years I have taken my body weight and other measures almost every morning. Like most people who track body data with Fitbits, smart scales or other means, I accumulated a lot of measurements over time, but did almost nothing with the data collected. As I’ve mentioned in several of my articles, a huge part of the motivation to start Life-Sparring was to push myself harder on my quest to improve myself, and along the journey, provide some value to those who read my ramblings. That’s motivation enough to dig into the data and take a closer look at some of it.
After many years of New Year’s resolutions that lasted hardly longer than a few weeks, I wanted to do it all differently in the first full year of my Life-Sparring experience. Choosing targets that fulfill the S.M.A.R.T criteria: being specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-related to be effective; making my goals public; and checking in regularly with you out there hopefully is enough to keep me motivated all year to achieve all goals for 2016. And just in case this is not enough, I added a punishment on top, promising to go to work in original Bavarian Lederhosen on the first working day in 2017 if I miss more than one of the six goals for the year. Scary!
So let’s see how I fared during the first quarter of the year!
