If you couldn’t tell from some of my earlier Bingo stuff…I love stats. I’m an engineer, math was always my favorite class. I like collecting stats, I like analyzing stats, and I like to try and interpret meaning from them. So I love to record a lot of my ‘life stats’ throughout the year in an excel file (or two…or three…) and see how I’m doing. It’s time for New Year’s Resolutions and it’s easy to say, “I’m going to lose weight in 2017”, but what does that mean? It’s not tangible, it’s not concrete, it doesn’t really help you get there. That’s like saying, “I want to be faster in speedrunning.” Obviously, we all do. What are you doing to get there? If you aren’t tracking your weight like you track your splits, you are going to have a tough time measuring your progress.

WARNING: Just because I track these stats, does not mean my life revolves around them. I don’t set my worth to them. They are tools, but they don’t measure my happiness. I see too many streamers measure their worth by how many followers or subs they have. I see too many people in the corporate world set their worth by how much money they make or how nice of a car they drive. It’s good to have goals, but it’s also good to step back and just enjoy life.

OK with that said, let’s get into some of the stats. This is one I started tracking last year after I decided I wanted to cut back on how much alcohol I drink (again, for New Years it’s very easy to say, “I’m going to drink less”…but I don’t think that does much, you don’t necessarily have to track it like this, but I would encourage it because it reinforces what you are striving for). Let’s look at 2015 again quickly:

There are basically 4 phases to this chart, my early pattern of drinking quite a bit, then there is a very clear point where I said, “That’s it time to change”. I had one week that was very very poor, and that was my summer vacation on the beach. But the late year slope is incredible. In total, about 160 drinks. So how did 2016 go?

Less defined slopes, more consistent throughout. I actually like the ‘choppiness’ of the graph. Usually meaning, I had a drink or two on the weekend and that was it. I feel like this is fairly healthy. 89 drinks on the year, down from the year before! And, should I decide I’m not happy and want to drink even less in 2017, I have a measurable quantity to strive for. I expect to drink about the same in 2017, as I’m pretty happy with this level. It allows me to go out and have a few drinks, but not get really carried away.

So that one looks pretty good, let’s go with one that went pretty bad: One of my goals of 2016 was to gain weight. I usually scale in around 140 pounds, and I wanted to get myself up to 150 (measurable, tangible). I wanted to do this by working out and gaining muscle. So how did it go?

The stats don’t lie: It’s pretty hard for me to gain weight. The early spike was AGDQ, where your options are greasy food carts outside or drive at least 15 minutes or starve. So I ate extremely bad. Outside of that, up to about late summer, I was working out fairly regularly and was at least maintaining around 143 pounds or so but still the trend is downward. But then the weight just kinda shifts way down and I couldn’t keep it (explained with more later). So this was a failed goal. But I learned a lot. And I can be more realistic about this year. I think for 2017 I’m going to go back to heavy focus on running, and if I end up back around 135 pounds then so be it. I’ll be light and quick and maybe I’ll try and train for some more races, something I haven’t done seriously in years. Speaking of running:

 I’ve never had a more ‘meh’ year of running. The only thing really keeping me with a consistent mileage was because I literally jog to and from work. I automatically get 5 days of running a week, and clip about 15 miles a week no matter what I do. That’s a good thing, in that I always my heart rate up on a daily basis and log some nice easy miles, but it’s not really working hard or training for anything. I’m tempted to try and train for at least a half marathon again in 2017, but we’ll see. It’ll probably be the second half so I don’t want to commit to that yet.

Let’s talk about that gap now, it’s very pronounced here, but you can actually even see it in the weight and alcohol charts. Something drastic happened that forced me to STOP running completely. What happened? I broke my collarbone while playing kickball, of all things, in a beer league. It was the first game of the season, and it was really out of character for me to even sign up for something, but I was feeling…adventurous, wanting to meet people, do something else for exercise? I’m not sure, but it ended up being a pretty big event for me in the year. I can resume running now, but I don’t think I want to try any heavy lifting at this point, so that’s why 2017 might be more of a running year instead of trying to gain weight again. Which is a shame, because I feel like 2016 would have been a good ‘training wheels’ year where I start to work out and 2017 would have been able to hit it really hard and get up to 150 pounds. Looking at another running stat:This one is very interesting. You can see the gap where I wasn’t running at all, but something else happened before that which caused all my runs to be much slower paced than before. What could have happened around that time of year that would make my runs that much slower? The heat of summer? Nah, it usually doesn’t affect me that much. Turns out it was….Pokemon GO. I usually ran with my phone an an app in the background to track distance and then forget about it. But now I was slowing down to try and spin pokestops and catch pokemon. This had an affect on my pace for the rest of the year, as you can see I never really got back to my usual running style. I don’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, I’m getting more distance ran, but on the other hand, none of it is super consistent pace.

These have all been ‘weekly’ stats throughout the year. I track some other numbers too: I like to see on what days I get the most of something done. Since I’ve already discussed, most of my running was simply Monday-Friday to get to and from work. I had a somewhat consistent M-W-F workout plan up until the point my collarbone was broken. Hours slept seems fairly standard, getting more sleep on the weekends and the least sleep on Monday morning. Weight seems insignificant regardless of day (I would think maybe the weekends would have higher weight, but it’s all so close). Some more on sleep:

This seems pretty healthy to me. Over 2/3 of the year falls between 6 and 9 hours of sleep. Most weeks are between 45 and 51 hours of sleep. But one thing this doesn’t track is my sleep durations. Sometimes I sleep for 5 hours but then take a 3 hour nap to make up for it, and I’ll call that 8 hours of sleep in the stats. It’s not a true representation of my sleep patterns, so I may tweak this one in the future.

All of the above charts are health/fitness based, but I also keep track of a lot of finances as well. In terms of money, I keep track of every expense, every penny, and where it goes. However, I’m kind of stuck at the moment. I designed and developed those budgeting spreasheets back in 2012 when I started my full time job, figuring it was all set and good to go. I accounted for a lot, but today I have several more accounts, retirement accounts, credit cards, and a bunch of other things I didn’t have back in 2012. That leads me to do weird accounting gymnastics in my excel sheets just to make it work. Two examples being I don’t count a purchase with credit until I pay that purchase off, and I don’t even include paypal money as ‘mine’ until it gets transferred into my checking account (which is a nice thought, but what if I use that account to buy something? That purchase gets a bit lost in the mix). So one of my goals of 2017 is to use these spreadsheets for one more year, and during this year work to retool them to fit more what I need and streamline the process for the future. Then I can have more fun stats to show off. 😉 But let’s take a look at the month by month picture for 2016:I’ve removed the Y-axis intentionally, but this is net-change in ALL accounts (income – expenses) One note: I don’t like having negative months. At all.  But what I’m finding is the more money that ends up in things like retirement accounts and accounts heavily tied to the stock market, the less I really have control. The market was down in January, and I did spend a week at AGDQ. On the flipside, November was a ‘Triple Pay Month”. I get paid every other Tuesday, and November happened to have 3 Tuesdays where I got paid. So this fluctuations pretty wildly at times. Let’s look at the bigger picture:

This is net-worth since I started my full-time job. This is what consistency and dedicated savings over nearly 5 years looks like. The spike in July 2014 was me deciding, “Oh hey I should probably add my 401k account to my spreadsheets” and the big dip in May 2015 was my first vehicle purchase (my accounting assumes the car has no value currently, and that if/when I sell it whatever I get will all just be a jump into income; not extremely accurate but that’s how I like to look at it). That’s really all there is to show in terms of money charts. Hopefully I have more in the future!

Moving on from charts and stats, some other key things in 2016 for me. I know a lot of people have said their 2016 has sucked. Looking back, I don’t think I could have asked for a better Spring. I helped encourage a lot of folks in the OoT Community to try out bingo. It created several tournaments and I feel like helped part of the community bond and get closer. That’s always a good thing. My hockey team that I cheer for won the Stanley Cup. I spent a lot of time in the woods, traveling around, tracking certain plants and mushrooms. I may have a more detailed post about that later. I also killed my first spring turkey, which we had recently for Thanksgiving dinner. I grew my beard longer than I ever had before, haha! Summer continued to be good. I was feeling confident. Playing pokemon GO was pretty amazing. I must usually have a look on my face that says, “Don’t bother me” but when this game was exploding strangers would actually talk to me about it once they saw I was playing. I even went up to people and helped them learn how to play, which is practically unheard of for me to ever engage a stranger like that. I decided to ride that momentum and join a league to play kickball, just something competitive and social to get me outside even more. And that’s when the year really fell apart for me…I broke my collarbone. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t work out, I couldn’t even play video games. I was in a sling for months. To someone who runs everyday and is so active, it drove me crazy. I skipped dinner half the time, it became too much effort to even make anything. I don’t want to say I fell into a depression, because it wasn’t really that…but even now I feel like I haven’t fully gotten back into the swing of things. My streams have been extremely infrequent. My work effort in my job has slipped. I feel like I’m just floating along. There was one bright spot in all this: I had a little mini vacation in San Francisco in October with a friend I had met from the UK that summer. That trip really helped me in a time where I was feeling pretty down. So as the year comes to a close, it was really a bit of a roller coaster. But, that’s life. Sometimes you can measure it in charts, and do your best to stay on track with things, but other times you don’t have control, and you have to deal with whatever situation you are put in.

In my next post, I’ll go over some of my goals for 2017, and what I want to accomplish moving forward.