Well. Another year trickled by. Plenty has happend in the past 365 days, plenty of things that I can’t remember, recall or reflect on. But through half-assed data tracking, I’ve become surprised at one thing in particular over the past year: my exercise.

Last year for my birthday, I broke down and called off my pride. I asked my parents to get me a heart rate monitor (and adapter for the Concept2). I hate metrics, especially when it comes to body-stuff. Scales are dumb and following them is even more moronic. But the more time and energy I invested in my workouts, the less I could rely on my body to “tell the difference” from the previous workout. I needed hard data.

Enter the Polar heart rate monitor. Though not quite a year since I unwrapped it, awkwardly figuring out how it worked, the data is close enough to examine…since July 15, 2004:

• I’ve spent over 70 hours consciously exercising.
• I’ve rowed 415,924 meters on the Concept2.
• I’ve run 164.2 miles (since November).
• I’ve lost 34 pounds.
• I’ve lost 5 inches on my waist.

…and all of that including three injury-induced recovery periods for my lower back and knee totaling over 3 months of rest.

When the passing hours of the days blend together, the weeks fading into one another, it’s hard to quantify just what you spend your life doing. I often pay little attention to the monotony of my life, of my routines that I have recently been thinking/writing about. But trying to reflect on this data, trying to remember what it is that I’ve spent the past year doing while my mind has been turned off…it’s both sad and envigorating to look at. I’m happy that I’ve dedicated time to being healthy, to self-discipline and habituating myself to things that I naturally avoid. But think of the other volunteer opportunities, service projects or acts of kindness that I could have participated in instead. Yes my health is markedly improved, but what about the world outside my own little bubble?

Perhaps the next year should be dedicated to improving that part of my life, as it is something that I dearly miss from my high school days.

Thankfully, there won’t be any data to ponder over, to quantify and reduce onto a spreadsheet. For everything truly looks much more bleak in Excel.