Lately, I’ve been experiencing some pretty bad symptoms of burnout. It’s not the first time I’ve found myself here, but this time it feels a lot heavier than ever before. I’ve reached out for help in the form of psychotherapy to try to better understand the root causes and also how to manage things. It’s been very beneficial, but I’ve got a ways to go still.
I’ve done a variety of streaks over the last bunch of years. I find the whole streak concept to be a decent motivator for things like fitness, daily tasks or trying to establish or break habits.
But sometimes a streak can be less than positive and for that reason, I think it’s more valuable to “break” a streak if you find it isn’t providing positive motivation anymore.
An example of this for me is something like the Wordle streak or completing the New York Times crossword. Wordle is an interesting one because you can lose your streak even if you still do the puzzle everyday because if you don’t get the word in six guesses, you lose the streak even though you put in the effort. That seems a bit counter productive to me and for that reason, I think it’s best to not care too much about that one.
My daily routine for the last little bit has been to wake up, go for a swim, make a coffee, do the Wordle, The Mini and the New York Times Crossword. Now that we’re not at the cottage anymore, the swim part of that routine will have to go away since I don’t have easy access to a lake or a pool.
I could replace that with a 5km run, but I don’t think I want to run every day for a while. And I also like having the run to split my workday in half.
We’re just back from a lovely week at a cottage down near Perth, Ontario. It’s on the north side of Christie Lake which is a very nice, clean and deep freshwater lake. We were at this cottage last July as well and as I did last year, I made a point of doing some “wild swimming” every morning when I woke up.
Wild swimming is what I call swimming. Over the last few years, people have seemingly discovered that you can swim in lakes, rivers and even the ocean! Amazing. Who knew that you could swim somewhere other than a swimming pool? Me. I knew.
I live in what would be considered one of the more walkable areas of Toronto - the Upper Beach, or Birch Cliff area. We have a streetcar line (503) about 600m from our front door that runs to downtown. There is a bus route (12 & 117) about 100m from our front door that goes to a subway station (Victoria Park) that is 1.5km from our front door. The regional GO Transit train stop is 1.6km from our front door.
I’ve always just used the standard(ish) formula to determine my max heart rate and then the various heart rate zones to train in. The one I liked is the 207 - 0.7 x age method. For me that results in a max heart rate of 170bpm.
Recently, I was watching some YouTube videos that suggested it would be far better to determine your actual max heart rate through an informal or formal fitness test. So, today I set out to do that.
We humans tend to notice milestones. Turning 37 is not a big deal but turning 40 means a special party. It’s nothing special when the stock market hits 9,642, but at 10,000? That’s a big deal. I remember the massive parties around the world for Y2K including a massive fireworks show at the Toronto waterfront. In 2001, there were no fireworks off the CN Tower and we probably just went to bed early.