Today I have been a non smoker for two years! 💪
I had been smoking for 31 years, had attempted to stop two times before in the span of a decade or so.
If you’re on the journey to become a non-smoker, I wrote about what helped me to stop smoking.
Today is the one-year anniversary of when I chose to become a non-smoker.
A colleague of mine noted the date and asked if I chose Star Wars day on purpose :D Nope, total coincidence! But it was a bit of a tour de force for me :)
For a month or two, it was constantly on my mind and it was a daily challenge not to smoke. Then it waned. I thought about smoking occasionally and then I didn’t. I don’t remember the turning point but there was one after which I had become a non-smoker, not merely one resisting temptation.
The smell doesn’t bother me. Nor does it make me crave the smoking.
When I last wrote about exercising I found the totals quite unbelievable. I look back at those today with a smile, because the ones I now have 9 months after are even more unbelievable. So I’ll check back here in a year to see how relative this all is.
This wearable wonder of computing makes it very easy to stay on top of sports. The reminders are annoying but useful and I noticed that I got those only when I slacked (hint, hint), which does not happen frequently. That’s how driven I am.
In 2021 I earned each of the monthly challenges, which are determined based on recent past progress and are meant to either keep you at the same level or elevate you a bit, so that at the end of the year you have improved. I wonder how big they can be after a while.
Apparently there is a point after which every challenge rotates between kil(ometers), min(utes) and (k)cal.
In 2020 I earned all but one, which I decided not to go for (24100 kcal, or 717/d) because I knew it was going to be too much even if it was the month of August, and I needed a break.
The January 2022 challenge is to walk or run 366.7 km (11.8/d). I’m not particularly up for it but I want to do it anyway. I miss the easy challenges though.
I now rotate between 7 pairs of sneakers and running shoes. I have also invested in some proper running outfits for chilly weather. It is to note that all of the sweaters I got were from the Men’s section. Not out of peculiarity but really because the colours are less flashy and the sizes fit me better.
Gizmo is now 8 years old. He happily prances along and I’m very glad he’s with me. We both get our share of daily exercise, fresh air and adventures, and it gives me greater security to be accompanied by a muscular yellow Labrador. When it’s not too cold and we are next to a river he gets to swim too (but not in the sea because the sound of the ebb and flow scares him.)
Long gone are the days when he would lag at the other end of the leash and need to be dragged, after running only 3 or 4 kilometers. We now go for 5K jogs once a week or twice, come back walking, and it’s perfectly fine. When we don’t run, we just walk. Sometimes for two to three hours on the weekends, and on average for an hour and a half everyday.
According to those tallies (generated by the excellent and free Fitness Stats iPhone app), my 2021 in sport can be broken down as follows:
To put things in perspective:
2021 is when I stopped smoking. I made up my mind in January or February and my strategy was to ramp up exercising, pick up an electronic cigarette, gauge if that was going to work, and carry on with the routine without smoking. That happened in May. I have not smoked since then. Woohoo!
But ramping up exercising meant that I burned more calories and therefore needed to up my food intake. Stopping smoking made me more hungry too, so I had two reasons to eat bigger portions.
I remember starting to eat as much and then a little more than my teenage boy! (Who abandoned basketball during the first year of the pandemic, and now more or less refuses to walk or hike with me even every now and then.)
I was a bit dismayed when I saw my weight ramp up slowly but very very steadily. It has now stabilized after 8 months or so, sometime in September.
But most of my clothes continue to fit me so that means that I lost fat and gained (6 kilos of) muscles.
One of the perks of being a paying subscriber of the sports tracking app Strava is the yearly report. See below.
Aside: I used to complain a lot about how that app was geared towards triathletes only. They fixed almost all the things I complained about and now it celebrates and motivates every kind of athletes, not just those who cycle, run and swim.
I was so ready to ditch Strava because it caused me more frustration than it brought me satisfaction, that a former work contact recommended I gave a try to the vastly underrated, and free, SportsTracker, developed by Suunto.
I love it. It’s a nice complement to Strava. I started using it at the end of March.
koalie’s contemplations in markup 
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