I read that about half of Apple watch owners who started using the activity app have lapsed in less than two months. I have not.
I am still closing circles and have done so every day since the third day I had the watch, except when we were at Kill Devil Hills. There Carol and I walked along the beach, but the watch didn’t consider it exercise because our pace was too slow. As anyone who has walked in soft sand knows, the app was wrong.
Of the three circles, the one about calories is irrelevant to me and I wish could be user defined. I would change it to flights of stairs climbed.
The standing and moving for a minute every twelve hours is easy, though I have had to pause movies we were watching or hope no one scores a goal in a soccer game or a run in baseball while, upon being tapped on the wrist at ten minutes before the hour, I get up and walk to the back of the condo and return. The iPhone can’t measure the slight difference in wrist elevation between sitting and standing, but does measure change in location and assumes if you’ve moved, you’ve stood.
The thirty minutes of exercise varies.
Ten or eleven minutes each day come from my self-imposed goal of climbing twenty flights of stairs.
Starting at our third floor condo, I climb two flights to the roof, then all the way down to the lowest level of the stair well, then back to the roof. For this the health app on the iPhone credits me with seven flights of stairs.
There are exactly one hundred stairs from the bottom to the top. At a normal pace I average sixty-eight seconds. Usually I try to go faster and make it in less than a minute. When I do I am breathing as hard at the top as if I had just run a wind sprint.
Yesterday I set a new personal best of fifty-two seconds.
The other twenty minutes of exercise comes in different ways.
My usual work-out of push-ups, crunches, etc., takes nineteen or twenty minutes. I do it three or four times a week.
On other days I do one of the two different sets of rotator cuff maintenance exercises, one with elastic bands, one with five pound weights. They take about twelve minutes each.
The rest is filled by bike riding and walking.
My normal pace of a little over sixteen minutes a mile on Evanston sidewalks is app acceptable. Condo to lake and back takes about seventeen minutes.
My usual bike ride to Northwestern and back, which I did this morning, takes a half hour.
One way or other, every circle every day.
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For several years I’ve wondered when I will no longer be able to do my age in push-ups. Because of my torn shoulder I thought this past northern winter that had already happened; but it hadn’t.
Yesterday I decided to push on past 73. I stopped at 80, although I could have continued. How far I don’t know. But 80 will carry me to 2021, and that is far enough for now.
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As presumably everyone knows California is having a drought.
Water restrictions are in place.
Kevin, my former neighbor at Driscoll’s Marina at Mission Bay, lives in adjacent Ocean Beach. He writes that Californians have reduced water usage by 25%.
Because of reduced consumption the water utility is not making enough money and has announced a rate increase of 17%.
Carried to a perhaps logical conclusion, if you used no water at all, your bill would be astronomical.
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To my pedestrian advice ‘Don’t do things at the last minute.’ Dave Bush added the wit: ‘except, perhaps, dying.’ I cannot fault leaving dying to the last minute. I thank him and have included his addendum on the wit page.
Also added to that page:
Define yourself, or others surely will.
I love entering the monastery of the sea.
(I started to write ‘A solo sailor’ instead of ‘I’, but realized that most solo sailors never enter the monastery of the sea. They blog via satellite devices, call home on SSB, send emails and messages. One almost wonders if they really want to be alone.)
I strive to avoid adventure, knowing I will have adventure anyway.
Prepare so that you don’t need good luck to succeed and only extreme bad luck can cause you to fail.
Persevere. (The subject of the next journal entry.)
