I walked 4.7 million steps in 2015

First time in my life I measured and recorded more details of my physical activities. In the past I did capture some of it - number of my runs, time, and some routes.
This time I captured more information.

On top of Mt.Joffre, June 20th, 2015

Running
I was curious to see how many times I ran in 2015, and at the end, the result was pretty good :). I ran 102 times, and that is a little bit less than I wanted (I was hoping  I could run 115 times). However, I was quite happy with it.
In the past, I ran a bit more or a bit less:

2010 = 117
2011=  75
2012 = 115
2013 =  92
2014 =  67
2015 = 102

Total is 568. I ran 568 times in 6 years, and that equals to almost 95 times per year.
It wasn't always easy to get out and run, especially during cold days.

A table below describes my running in 2015.



As I already wrote in my previous post, numbers and data are powerful - they can tell us a story.

In 2015 I ran 102 times and during these runs I run 950 km. It took me 5377 minutes with average pace of 5:03. Not bad (kind of not bad, it would've "sounded" better if I did faster than 5 minutes).
My average speed was 11.9 km/h, and I burnt 84480 calories.

It is interesting to mention that I also gained almost 8 km of altitude during my 102 runs (7807 meters). There were no hills running, all of it happened through normal runs.

Walking
I love to walk. That's the closest physical activity to our ancestors. They didn't drive cars everywhere, they walked and ran instead.
I walked 4 776 126 steps. This is of course approximate number, but I can say that it was around 4.7 million.


The most number of steps I did in July (463 533), when I had an average of almost 15 000 steps per day. It was a month of long mountain traverses.
I walked the most on June 19th, when we did approach to Mt.Joffre - 35 867 steps. During week of June 15-22, I did the most steps in one week - 141 826.

Cycling
I only do mountain biking and I can only do it during certain months. I usually start in late April, when snow melts, and sometimes I can even ride until early November. This year it was over in October as we got early snow.



These are just the numbers but it is fun for me to see and read what I did. It was also fun to prepare the numbers, to get from raw data to presentable information.
I do not do this because of the numbers or because I want to do more steps, or to do more runs, or want to break some records.
Only goal is to do it.
Am I going to continue doing it? I will, and who knows how much in 2016.
All will be done with my own power.

We did almost great in 2015

It is amazing how much we can learn about behaviours and patterns when we know and have enough information. I am not an expert on data, but I pay attention to it, and I invest an effort to collect it. It is fun to do it as well. In order to leverage power of data, we need to collect it first. As an executive of Dawnbreakers since 2009, I have built a data information repository about the club thanks to some useful websites. When I joined Dawnbreakers in January 2009, there were no any websites associated with the club, so there was no data. At the end of every meeting, no information was saved and we didn’t know anything about our attendance, number of speeches, words of the day, meeting themes, and awards winners. Obviously some data was kept, to be passed to Toastmasters International, but only officers in charge (VP of Education, VP of Membership) possessed it.

And then, Easy-Speak came. Together with Wang Yip, I introduced and "pushed" Easy-Speak three years ago. It was really Wang who started it but it was me who started populating its database with retroactive meetings information. I was able to do it because I had audio recordings of the meetings since October 2012. It was a long process in which I spent lots of time listening the audio, and then transcribing it to Easy-Speak. The process became easier when we exclusively started to use Easy-Speak for our club management. Thanks to Blaine Zuk who as VP of Education pushed it in 2014, we utilize now Easy-Speak as our meeting/members/data management tool. It is a private application and only authorized users can leverage its data and functions.

Some of our data

As I enjoy working with data and I am curious, I am pleased to present some insights about Dawnbreakers 2015 year, and provide some comparisons with 2013 and 2014.

Meetings

Everything starts and ends with meetings. Without them, nothing would happen. So, there were 43 meetings in 2015. That is pretty close to previous two years, when we had 44 (in 2013) and 43 (in 2014) meetings. 

Do you know who was the most frequent participant?
People who attended more than 50% of meetings:

Congratulations to Peter Kossowan who only missed 3 meetings. And that is not all, Peter performed 37 roles during meetings he attended. And he was always the first one to show up and help setting the room up.

18 people (in the table above) attended more than half of all meetings.

Speeches

There were 113 speeches in 2015. For comparison, there were 117 speeches in 2013, and 99 speeches in 2014.
This is where we can improve. Basically we didn’t use opportunities to speak, as there were 16 speaking slots that were not used in 2015. If you are asking how I got to that number, it is a simple calculation: 43 meetings x 3 speeches = 129 speeches. Out of 129 possible speeches we had 113, so that means that 16 were not delivered.
This number is actually very close to the number in 2013 when we had 117 speeches during 44 meetings, and this resulted with 15 unused slots. In 2014 we were not that successful, as out of 129 slots we only used 99.
Below is the list of people who delivered the most speeches in 2015:

The most frequent speaker was Richard Coulter, who spoke 6 times out of 20 meetings.

Icebreakers

It is always special to witness an Icebreaker speech, and at Dawnbreakers we had that privilege more than less 14 times!
We always say that someone becomes a toastmaster only once they deliver their Icebreaker speech.

There were 3 icebreakers in March and 3 in June, 2 in January and February.
There were no icebreakers in May, September and December.
Also, there were 16 icebreakers in 2013 and 17 in 2014.
This also means that there have been 47 new people (who gave Icebreaker) in our club since, and that means we got lots of fresh blood and new ideas.

Being "ditched"

Yes, you can get ditched at Dawnbreakers. Many of us were ditched numerous times. We were ditched by our fellow members. We also ditched our colleagues. I did it too.
If you were a toastmaster at Dawnbreakers you know that feeling: It is 6:55 AM, and your Sgt. at Arms hasn’t arrived yet (well, thanks to Peter Kossowan, the room is already arranged). Chairman is also absent, and even more, 2 out of 3 evaluators are missing. So, you try quickly to assign these roles to others, and now folks will do multiple roles. Great! It was never that bad, as described above, but it did happen numerous times. People accept their roles, they say they are coming, and then they don’t show up. Obviously, in reality, in our world this happens - sometimes something happens that takes priority. Sometimes it is a bad traffic. Sometimes we miscalculate time, when time changes in spring or fall. Sometimes there is some emergency. But, there were some people who did it more than twice, or even more than three times.

There were 57 "ditchings" in 2015. 26 different people “ditched” us, and 23 people didn't. 1 person ditched us 6 times, 2 people 5 times, and 1 person 4 times. There were also 4 people who didn’t show up 3 times, and 5 people 2 times.

In the big picture all of this is good as well. It gave us opportunities to improvise and to come up with impromptu solutions.

Conclusion

It was a great year. We've been improving in all areas. You really see the strength of our club when you attend other club's meetings. It is important that we maintain this high bar and actually go higher with it.

Also, this is just the beginning of this “data journey”, as we only have 3 years of data. We’ll be getting more information as we go, and future reports will give us better idea about club success. It will also set us up for better and more leveraged meetings in the future. I also hope that someone else will recognize this and invest his/her time to continue collecting and analyzing data.

When I get bored of it.

Convincing Myself

The goal is to do it

I love running in winter. I even do the most of my running during winter months. And where I live, we get real winters, cold and long. Winters with a lot of snow but also winters with lots of sunshine and blue bird days.

Last winter I ran 15 times in November, 16 times in December, 15 times in January, 16 times in February, and 15 times in March. 77 times in total.

This winter so far I ran 10 times in November and 5 times in December. Well, I've been busy with mountain climbing for the last couple of months so I slowed down.

Running in winter is like a long game of convincing someone to do something that will hurt at first but it will definitely turn into something that feels great. But they don't know about the "pleasant" part. It is an exploration exercise, again connected with pain and pleasure. How cold is it outside? How much new snow did we get last night? How icy is it? How windy? Which hat should I wear? Which gloves should I wear? Do I need my shoes with spikes or my waterproof shoes?

There are so many parameters to a pleasant run.. But then, if I know everything, nothing is interesting anymore.

Therefore, many times I just get out of the house wearing only basics and I just go. I get exposed to elements. And that's beautiful.

Sometimes I change my route on the fly. If there was too much snow and my route is taking me uphill, especially if there is a long climb, I choose something easier. In the past I would plow my way through the deep snow but lately my hip flexors complain about it.

I also change my route if it gets too warm or when there is new snow during last seven days. Running on a little bit of new snow, on a warm day, when temparature is in range between -4 C and + 2 C is similar to running through quick sand. Two steps forward, one step back. Not even spikes help. I call it "suffering" (really, it is not, but it hurts, and I want less pain).

Cold world that is not cold, but just it is

When it is really cold in my world, and for me that is under -20 C, it is only hard before I get outside as I am procrastinating, and during first 10 minutes until I warm up. It is too hard to get out from warm house to this polar world. When I start running my face is cold as I never wear a face mask, and my eyes get wet. So I am struggling at the beginning. At the same time, when it is really cold there are no problems with sandy snow, cold wind - well, it is already too cold anyway - and the best part, there is nobody out there. The truth is that usually there is nobody out there anyway - but when it is - 25 C, then I could be on Mars and it would be same in terms of people.

During my winter runs I enjoy experiencing elements, cold, brisk air, falling snow, bright sunshine, cold wind - and also it is great to listen to my steps on the ice and snow, as I already mentioned. 

Crunchy sound produced by my feet's interaction with the ice and snow - so rhythmic and powerful, it gives me assurance about my own power.

By moving like this, using only my own power, I feel closer to beings that we were once before in the past. By being exposed to the elements, I feel again closer to our ancestors who were free of "progress", but rich with understanding and connection with nature.

Running during winter months makes me feel human again. It gives me assurance that the world is indeed beautiful, when not endangered by some humans. Running in the winter helps me understand myself and it makes me free and understood.