I veered off my Beeminder yellow brick road due to my decision earlier this week to defer my scheduled workout by a day.

I’m back on track, $10 poorer and the stakes have gone up.  Next time I go off the rails it’s a $30 penalty.

I’m going to keep a running tally of my Beeminder penalties and whatever the total is when I hit my goal is what I’ll donate to charity.

Ouch.  Going back to interval work after ANY kind of a break is brutal.

I need to control myself on my lead off intervals a little better.

Pushup workout today was a best effort test.  Result: 75 pushups.  19% improvement from my first test.

Awwww-yeeeeeeaaaahhhhhh . . . .

Quick spin on the bike.

I considered going out into the countryside to go for a proper ride, but I hate dislike riding by myself and the weather was a little dodgy as well which gave me a nice justification to wuss out.

Here’s the tricky bit about fitness goals: you can’t really control them.  Almost all of the metrics for fitness that are commonly used as goals or benchmarks or measures of success such as bodyweight, run times, lift amounts, etc. are secondary effects.

For example, let’s say you wanted to lose twenty pounds.  It’s easy to make that your goal and create a plan to lose one pound a week for twenty weeks.  So you create a diet plan and a workout schedule and you get started.  The problem is that your body is a complex system.  You might follow your diet and workout plans to the letter, but some weeks you might lose two pounds (or more) and other weeks you might not lose anything.  At the end of twenty weeks you could have executed your plan faithfully and still failed at your goal.  The same holds true for any fitness goal.  Running faster, lifting more, doing more pushups, anything.

That isn’t to say that fitness results are random or not correlated to diet and exercise.  They are, but it’s a complicated relationship.  It’s important to have goals if you want to improve (or maintain) your fitness because those goals help you structure your regimen and develop your plan.  But in my opinion it’s much more important on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis to track and adhere to process or program related benchmarks, than it is to only track your goal metric.  Your goal metric should be something that you only return to occasionally to assess the effectiveness of your planning and effort.

For example, on my goal to achieve 100 consecutive push-ups I don’t grade myself on how many push-ups I do each day.  I might be tired one day, I might do my pushups after a cardio workout or on a floor surface that doesn’t provide ideal traction.  There are a ton of things that could impact the number of pushups I do and failing to hit a specific number or to reach a specific number by a specific date could be frustrating or interpreted as a personal failure rather than a data point.

My Beeminder tracker is set up to track whether or not I do the workouts.  I didn’t make my plan to do a certain number of consecutive pushups every day or every other day or anything like that.  I track my workout consistency, do what the workouts in the program require and then every couple of weeks or so do a diagnostic test to see what my goal metric performance is.  Then based on those tests I can decide to tweak my plan to improve my performance.

Likewise, if I was trying to lose weight I wouldn’t use my daily weight as a performance metric (although I might still record it daily, complicated, I know).  I’d have goals related to caloric intake; exercise intensity, duration and consistency; and rest and stress reduction goals.  Then I’d concentrate on achieving those objectives and periodically check my weight to ensure that my plan was having the desired affect.  If my overall weight trend wasn’t what I wanted I would adjust the parameters of my plan to get the results I want.

This is a tricky issue because if you aren’t careful it can lead to fatalism about your results (or lack thereof) rather than treating it as feedback about the effectiveness of your plan.

Run:

Pushups:

I got a little off track with my pushups while I was traveling last week (BKK-NRT-ORD-MBS-Norfolk, VA-Upper Peninsula-MBS-ORD-NRT-BKK).  I got COMPLETELY off track with my other training but considering I spent more than 80-hours flying and driving during that time and the weather was below freezing and snowing the whole time, I’m giving myself a pass on that.

The pushups though I coulda/shoulda stayed on track with.  I’m still relatively close to schedule but we’ll see.  I entered my retroactive data in to Beeminder and emailed their support team to update my charts.  Once they do that I’ll see if I’m still off track.  If so, I’ll pay up again and drive on.

Turns out I’m not working out tonight. I was going to do Week 4, Day 3 of my push-up program which would have put me JUST BARELY on the outer edge of being on track with that plan. And then throw in a nice easy jog just to start up my workout streak again.

But I am completely toasted. I have got to go to bed and get my routine back in sync. And you know what? I am totally okay with that. I’m calling this a holistic fitness decision.

I’ll be ready to hit it hard tomorrow. Including figuring out what is going on with my Beeminder tracking.

Cheers.

I’m back from an emergency trip stateside. Weather, travel, the International Date Line and lack of internet access combined to destroy my workout and posting routine. But that’s life, especially when you’re supporting your loved ones.

Back at it tomorrow. See you there. Er, here.

I’m traveling in support of an unexpected personal situation.  My workout routine is completely derailed but I’m worried overmuch because of the reason and the nature of the travel.

However, a deal is a deal and a failure is a failure.  I am off the tracks with my Beeminder pushup goal because I chose to eat dinner last night instead of doing my workout (although I might have been off track anyway, the international date line is tricky and I haven’t figured out how to fairly account for its affect).

Anyway, we’re about to hit the road.  I got up this morning and knocked out Week 4, Day 1 of the Hundred Pushups app program.  120 total pushups in five sets with sixty second rest intervals.

Felt good to sweat.  Remember: especially during times of personal stress and emotional challenge, keep taking care of yourself.  When you’re stressed, it’s more important to maintain your routine as much as possible and take good care of yourself.  Other people won’t understand, but that’s not as importnatn as you think.

Cheers.

My next cycling workout is gonna be a game changer . . . stay tuned . . .