In the fall of 2011, my doctor told me, “you’re on the border for diabetes.” That scared me into action. I’d been aiming for an hour of exercise per day and requiring myself a minimum of 30 minutes (travel days and the very rare sick days excepted). I immediately doubled that. (I also looked at my diet.)

For the next three+ years, I dutifully tracked the number of minutes of exercise I did each day—but I didn’t track the results cumulatively. My pound-shedding had plateaued, and I decided that starting on January 1, 2015, I’d log the minutes each day on that month’s calendar page.

At the end of January, I totaled it up—and was shocked to discover that far too great a percentage were much too close to the one-hour mark. Although I did have 9 days where I exceeded 120 (including two days of 160 minutes) and four days at exactly 120, that meant I failed to make two hours 22 out of 31 days. I had too many with numbers like 63, 65, 75, and even one total bust with only 30 minutes. Tracking over the course of the month made me realize how I was letting myself cheat. My total exercise for January 2015 was only 2277 minutes, with a paltry daily average of 73.45.

But here’s the thing: because I was tracking, I was able to adjust. For the remaining 11 months, I never got less than 3290 minutes (February). Many of them were in the 3600 to 3900 range, and in October, I actually went past 4000. The difference even between 2277 and 3290 is an extra 16.88 hours of exercise between January and February—not too shabby. I ended the year with 42,178 minutes of exercise, or an average of 115.55 minutes a day. If I drop January off the average, it goes to 119.46, or just a whisker under my goal of 120 minutes. Because I was tracking, I ended the year averaging an hour and fifty-five minutes, versus an hour and thirteen in January. That’s a significant increase.

Shel reading at the exercise bike. Photo by D. Dina Friedman

Since I do a lot of my reading (and a lot of my exercise, especially in the winter) on the exercise bike, I decided to also track how many books I read. In 2015, I read 89 books. Some of these were monsters in the 500 or 600-page range. Others were quick and easy Young Adult novels of 100-150 pages. Many were business/environmental/social change books, including at least one a month for my review column. But I read more fiction and memoir, by far. This is an outgrowth of a resolution I made several years ago to do at least five minutes of pleasure reading per day. Once I started using the exercise bike regularly, this was a resolution that was easy to exceed.
The proof? I went back to the doctor this summer, and my blood work was all in the normal range (yay!).

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