#1millionsteps

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I’m still doing the 1MillionSteps for Diabetes UK (sponsor us please if you have a few quid?) and it’s exhausting, coupled with work and my pill currently giving me a period every couple of weeks (I have a Drs appointment, I’m dreading it)

This thing is mostly running on queue and occasionally where I see a cool thing I’ll reblog it.

I’ve not written (apart from a very half arsed adventure last weekend) in weeks, and I’m barely crafting. This is making me sad. This weekend I am setting aside for writing and making stuff (and walking, always walking) so there will probably be spam of some kind.

My new friend Christa and I hanging out at the Tour De Fat.

This weekend was a ton of fun and included me basically not being home all weekend.  As a result I didn't get nearly enough steps to keep on pace but sometimes just hanging out with the right sets of people is what's in order.

Friday night was spent at my best friends' house playing board games and generally just catching up before going to bed because we knew that Saturday was going to be an early start with a pre-6A wake up. Saturday was a super up and down day for me personally including a little too much alcohol and a stay at another friend's home. Sunday was a game night at a different friend's home.  Overall, a lot of fun.

Once again, I leveraged the late night out = early morning walking to produce my largest day since starting this challenge: 41,121 steps.  This greatly helped to bring my deficit down from more than 33,000 steps in total to just over 14,000.  Definitely a number I can bring back over a couple of days.

Drumroll please for the updated stats!

Total steps: 430,003

Total above/below pace to hit goal: -14,437

Total mileage: 194.77 miles

It's been 5 days since my last post and while that doesn't technically mean that I had abandoned my pursuit of this million step goal (far from it), it did mean that I needed to re-examine the how relating to the way I'm documenting this journey.  

I really like the first post here on the blog as it challenged me both to write in a more in depth way and it gave me a much better opportunity to create a storyline that I think will help myself encapsulate the experience and give you some insight into the meaning that each challenge has. 

The problem in executing this is that my writing muscle is fairly atrophied due to the fact that a substantial portion of my professional career has been spent crafting Facebook and Twitter messages which are less than 141 characters. Only on two occasions since the completion of my undergraduate degree have I decided to write anything longer than 5,000 words. (For those wondering, the first was my master's thesis and the second was a plan to help scale my employer's social media fulfillment capability.)  

I also believe that an additional root cause of my lack of confidence to write in an essay format is tied to a couple of experiences with my father which I completely misinterpreted. (Hey Pop, if you ever read this, I love you. As you'll see, this one is on me.)

While I was in 7th or 8th grade I commented to my father that I thought that I wanted to be an attorney just like him during a completely normal dinner table discussion.  He flatly told me that I "didn't possess the language skills." Obviously, he was right. I was maybe 14 at the time.  His experience of writing for his high school and college newspaper was very different from my experience which included an obsession with baseball and video games. 

A few months later, I gave my father a three page paper for either a history or government class.  I forget which but both were subjects I had a moderately high interest in at that time. I asked him for his input on how to make my essay better. He did what any good former newspaper editor and attorney would do: he marked it all up in red and turned my three page paper into an 7-page teardown on how to improve my writing style and correct my grammatical errors. Obviously, part of me saw the sea of red and was completely mortified as this went against my internalized idea that I was a smart kid. This was not the most confidence inspiring moment in my young writing career.

At that point, in a completely expected teenage angst-y fashion, I swore never to share any of my school work with my father again before it was graded and I had it back from my teachers. The craziest part about this mini-grudge is that I somehow actually succeeded in doing it through all of high school.

Looking back there were two key problems with how I processed this situation; First, was that I misinterpreted the fact that my father's suggestions were a personal attack on me and my writing ability.  Obviously, this wasn't my father's intention. He was trying to help in the absolute best way that he knew how to make the content on the page better.

The second issue, and this is one I only learned about a year or so ago, is that senior attorneys improve the work of their more junior associates by simply showing them the right way to do things and changes are accepted en masse. Sure, if an associate has a quibble with a single line or two they can discuss that particular point but the vast majority of those suggested changes get the proverbial "Accept All Changes" button. I certainly had no clue at 14 that this was what was going the way he was trying to teach me.

Looking back, pairing an egotistical reaction with a lack of contextual awareness lead me to create a blind spot that was unaware of how poor my actual writing skill was. My father tried to point this out to me because he had the skills and the time to try and help me.  I refused his help on probably hundreds of occasions.  (Admittedly, not my smartest move.)

Making a bad situation worse was the fact that I continued to get good grades all through high school, college and grad school lulling me into thinking I was communicating effectively.  Social media and it's quick in-and-out style played to education that I did receive in traditional marketing and tagline writing but never provided an opportunity to do something longer form. 

This all brings me back to where I am now: seeking an opportunity to document a challenging experience in a medium that I am going to find challenging. Certainly sounds like a second opportunity for me to grow.  I'm not going to back down from it especially when it will make this more fun for both you and me.

No more daily data dumps. Also, I'm not going to have the expectation that I will be able to write this way every day so you can expect an update every few days going forward. Stories are a hell of a lot more fun to write and read.

Today, October 1st, is Day 15 of my 1 million steps in 45 days challenge. One-third of my time is gone at 11:59 P.M. tonight. Accordingly, tomorrow you'll get a long form update of what has happened in the last week including some of the ups and downs. I'm certainly excited to share it with you.

Hey! I'm Kade.

Here's the basic premise of this site: I will choose a challenge for myself to complete in 45 days or less. It's really that simple. It has to be large but not so huge that it's insurmountable.

I've had this idea for more than a year and have failed to actually do anything with it because I felt like there was no obvious clear path to this becoming something that I could monetize or leverage in some professional way. That said, the idea won't stop bubbling back up in my mind so I might as well tend to it for a single 45 day period and see what comes of it and if I enjoy the process.

In the past, I've never been great at executing things for years on end. I work best in a sprint mode where the goal is near enough that I can focus and work hard to nail it and then move on to the next challenge/opportunity. This has been the case both personally and professionally. (The only clear exception to this was my undergraduate degree but there I took a four-year degree and completed it in 33 months.) I crave variability and a clear end and I don't expect that to change any time soon.

Between Ramit Sethi, Pam Slim and Chris Guillebeau they each preach that a goal has three core pieces: 1) A result 2) A metric 3) A deadline

It's my intention that each of the challenges I take on meet all three of these.

My First Challenge: 1,000,000 steps recorded by FitBit by November 1st.

A step is simple enough to take. If you're like most folks you average 5,117 steps a day. Some folks get more if they're living in an inner city situation or walk to work, some less if they are trapped at a desk all day and drive to and from work. In order for me to hit my goal I've got to do 5x what the average person walks every day for all 45 days. This doesn't scare me on any particular day given that I've had days as high as 49,000 steps but the consistency piece is going to be the challenge here.

Why even do this challenge?

Well, I've been wearing a FitBit on and off since 2009 and since then I've racked up some 11.7 million steps.  Tracking my steps isn't something new for me so the continuing to track them won't be a big change for me.

Additionally, earlier this summer I added a treadmill desk to my home office set up and have seen a drastic uptick in my willingness to walk and work and the total number of steps I can complete in a day.

Finally, my daily step counts are publicly available so there's an accountability built in.  I've been throwing that data out there for years and no one has cared yet.

All said, no real behavioral change other than simply taking more steps every day makes this the right kind of challenge to try out this 45 day challenge idea on.

Why Tumblr? Given all the different CMSes I've worked with over the years I had never worked with tumblr (yea, I can hear some of you shouting "WTF" and "this is so 2009" from here). The platform seems especially suited to the simple kind of posts that I intend to make each day to help hold myself accountable. Some days, it'll just be screen grabs from my FitBit page or app, other days a full post explaining how I did things or reflections upon the process and results.

No matter what, I will have my cell phone on me and the tumblr app seems shockingly simple to post here. Ideally, I'll be doing a daily post including a running total, a description of whether or not I am ahead of schedule or behind and the number of days remaining.

I've toyed with incorporating multiple challenges at the same time and/or staggering challenges to start every 15 days but since this is the first 45 day experiment I am just going to let this one play itself out before I begin to complicate things. I don't think I will be doing a Colin Wright-style opportunity to accept challenges from the readers (oh wait, there won't be any for a long time in all likelihood) but that may change in time. These goals will be things that I want to do simply because I haven't done them before or I think that they somehow resonate with a part of who I am.