I woke up sore yesterday. It seemed fitting for the last day of 2022. The day before I ran on the treadmill at the gym because it was pouring rain. But I ran — something I couldn’t say I could do at the beginning of 2022. I wanted to run a solid hour, but my body told me I shouldn’t push that long yesterday. So, I listened to my body (something I didn’t do a great job of last year).

When I got off the treadmill, I was a little disappointed I didn’t get as far as I wanted to but I was quick to remind myself of just how much I had accomplished — again, at the beginning of last year I wasn’t running at all. Three and a half miles is an accomplishment, but my mind tends to focus on the negatives… it’s just the way it works. It’s something I’ve been working on. Last year I hiked Mount Umunhum, Mount Saint Helena, and Mount Tamalpais. But what I think about most is how I didn’t finish Mount Diablo, getting sick just a mile from the summit. Didn’t listen to my body. (But look at what you did do!).

I started my own company – Think Dude Think LLC – and used it to publish my first book, the first three years of 31 Ghosts (which [shameless pitch] is available here at Amazon). For the record, I put it together myself – all the layout and design – that’s me. Months detached I can at least appreciate the effort. These are lifelong goals I can check off! And yet, I’ve been beating myself up over not getting the audiobook done before the end of the year, or really writing anything since finishing October’s run of 31 Ghosts (my god, the sixth year I’ve done that – another accomplishment I don’t think I’ve let myself appreciate).

And let’s get back to being able to run and hike, shall we? Back in November I wrote about accomplishing one year of consecutive 10,000 step days. Well, I’ve kept up on that – I’m on my 416^th consecutive day of at least 10,000 steps now. Isolating 2022 – because this is a year-in-review kind of thing – I walked (or ran or hiked) 2,249 miles over the course of the year. That sort of thing can change a guy – I also lost 34 pounds. I’m now down to a weight I haven’t seen since the Clinton administration.

But in June I was shocked to discover during a routine physical that, surprise! I’m diabetic. Type II. I didn’t take it well. I haven’t written about it at all, and if this is the first you’re hearing about it, don’t feel bad – it took a month before I could mention it to anyone other than Akilah, and even then I don’t think I told anyone outside of immediate family. I went on medication, I dramatically changed my diet (and the combination was key to losing most of those 34 pounds), I logged my glucose twice a day (as well as a weight, resting heart rate, temperature, blood pressure – I was not going to be surprised by my body again!), and I kept up the exercise. I have a series of short videos of me staring into my phone sweating and panting at the top of various mountains saying, “Fuck you, diabetes!” And my work paid off – when I went back in September, my A1C dropped dramatically – technically I’m “pre-diabetic” now (so… post-diabetic as pre-diabetic…? Am I my own prequel?). And yet, I was hounding myself leading up to the most recent test on Friday because it had been a super stressful quarter and my diet had slacked more than it should have and I knew I was going to regress because I’m a horrible person, and… look, I know I’m not a horrible person. But this is what goes on in my mind. And, for the record, the results came back and I was actually .1 point lower than the September number. Not much, but the needle moved for the better.

I made a deliberately over-stuffed list of things to do over the week I had off between Christmas and New Years – there were bigger things like “build a spice rack” and clean various rooms mixed in with less intensive things like “meditate” and “go for a motorcycle ride.” With just a day left in my vacation I didn’t get even half the things (big and small) checked off, and that’s fine… mostly. I countered the negative voices by telling myself I should make a list of the things I did that weren’t on the list. One of the things I didn’t check off was “Take stock of 2022.” This post is part of that, though outside of just rolling the events around in my head I didn’t really wrestle with it too much outside of writing it down now.

Part of the problem has been exactly what I’ve put down here already – as soon as I acknowledge, “I did this,” part of me immediately comes back with “Yes, but you didn’t do that.” Voltaire wrote that “Perfect is the enemy of good,” and it’s damn well one of my worst enemies as well. As much as I’ve battled my weight, and putting a book together, and diabetes, I’ve battled myself more existentially on this front. I think I’m winning – I don’t think I’d be able to chalk up as many items in the “win” column this year if I weren’t – but it’s a slog. I’m getting better, but this is my chief adversary again for a productive 2023.

In years past I’ve put together not resolutions, but goals. I’m not going to do that this year. I have some ideas of what I want to accomplish – both vague and concrete – but if these last few years has taught us anything it’s to expect the unexpected. We’ll see what 2023 has in store. One thing I can guarantee is that I’m going to keep moving and evolving.

Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now.
– Bob Dylan, Mississippi

My walk last night wasn’t particularly spectacular. It was long – a rainy day meant the bulk of my steps came during my evening walk (a little over three miles worth). I got lucky and caught a perfect break in the weather – not a drop of rain, though I was dressed for it just in case. The only notable things were the loud fight in one of the homeless encampments next to my route (Alli and I opted for a detour…) and my Fitbit’s heart rate sensor kept going flaky on me – an increasingly common trend of my weather-beaten Charge 4. But other than that, it was just another walk.

Oh, and it marked the 365^th consecutive day I’ve gotten at least 10,000 steps.

That’s a milestone that I find both awe-inspiring and mundane. Awe-inspiring because I have done this now for a year – come rain, come frigid temperatures, traveling, working two and three jobs, illnesses (oh yeah, I got covid this year, too!), everything that has happened in the course of a year and I still managed to get at least 10,000 steps in every. Single. Day.

But it’s a bit of a mundane milestone because, when I set out to do this – and you’d best believe this was a deliberate effort – my goal was simple: wake up every day with the knowledge that I would get 10,000 steps in. Not “I might get my steps in.” Not “I hope to…” No, just an ingrained knowledge that as sure as I got out of bed, I was going to get 10,000 steps in.

So, when I went to my log and typed in “11237” for my steps yesterday it felt… unremarkable. After all, I’d done 11,507 the day before, and almost 16 thousand steps the day before that… But it was remarkable – 11 thousand steps is not insignificant, and 10,000 steps for a year is an achievement!

A few years ago when I started walking for health – before we got Alli and I convinced myself I was walking for her – I remember walking across the valley floor at Armstrong Woods. It was late afternoon and I was crisscrossing the flat trails in the dappled light through the redwoods and I thought first how lucky I was to just be there among those majestic trees. And then I thought how lucky I was to be able simply walk there. I don’t think I was at my heaviest at that point, but I was pretty close and I found myself in tears because I was so grateful my body was holding up as well as it had.

At the time I had a gym membership, but I had more excuses for not going than I had actual attendance figures. But walking? In a goddamn redwood forest? That I could do. And I did. Because I could. Because I owed it to my body that put up with my neglect.

There’s a recurring reminder I set probably just after that walk to “Get 3 10,000 step days in a week!” I don’t remember when I wrote it, but I remember at the time that was a very ambitious goal – one I didn’t often hit!

One year of 10,000+ step days.

I mentioned I keep a log of my steps, and it’s yielded some interesting stats for this period:

• 365: number of consecutive 10,000 step days (as already stated).
• 2,309: number of miles walked over that period.
• 4,953,094: total number of steps taken over that period (that boggles my mind).
• 41,180: highest number of steps in one day during that period (that was my Mount Tam hike in September!).
• 10,082: the fewest steps in a day during that period.
• 39.8: the number of pounds I’ve lost since starting this quest.

It’s been quite a year! I absolutely intend on continuing as long as I can. In a few days I’ll celebrate the year anniversary of consecutively meeting my other metrics (steps, floors, distance, calories, and “zone minutes”). This has been phenomenal for my health and I am only going to keep working on it!

Here’s to the next year!