Last year, when I talked about finally seeing the Apple Watch becoming mildly useful, I had no idea what kind of a ride I was going to be on.
Generally, I’m not really concerned about my health nor fitness, but last September, when my wonderful girlfriend left for a year of study in England, I decided that I finally had enough and I wanted to lose weight.
Having a year of near-zero social obligations would totally allow me to adjust my life-style in a way that’s conducive to weight loss, so here’s what I started doing:
- During weekdays, I greatly reduced my calorie intake to basically just a salad and a piece of bread every day (you can pry my bread from my cold dead hands – it’s the one food I think I like the most).
- Every day, no matter the weather, no matter the workload, no matter what, I was going to walk home after my work-day in the office, or on weekends, I would just take an equivalent walk.
- Every day, I wanted to fill the “Activity” and the “Exercise” rings on my apple watch.
Now walking home sounds like nothing special, but I’m privileged to live in Zürich Switzerland, which means that I have very easy access to forests to walk in.
So commuting home by foot meant that I could walk at least 8 kilometres (4.9 miles), climbing 330m (1082 feet), most of it through the forest.
Every day, no matter whether it was way too hot, way too cold, whether it was raining, hailing or snowing, I would walk home. And every day I would be using my Apple Watch to track what I would generously call a “Workout” (even though it was just walking – but if you go from zero sports to that, I guess it’s ok to call it that).
From September to December I started gradually increasing the distance I walk.
This is the other great thing about Zürich: Once you reach the forest (which you do by walking 20 minutes in practically any direction), you can stay in the forest for hours and hours.
First I extended the 8km walk to 10km, then 12, then 14 and finally 19 (11 miles).
During that time, I kept tracking all the vital signs I could track between the Apple Watch and a Withings scale I bought 1-2 months into this.
My walks got faster and my heart rate at rest got lower and lower, from 80 to now 60.
Every evening after the walk, I would look at the achievements handed out by my Watch which is also why I’ve never updated my movement goals in the Activity app because getting all these badges, honestly, was a lot of fun and very motivational. Every evening I would get notified of increasing my movement streak, of doubling or even tripling my movement goal and of tripling or quadrupling my exercise goal.
Every morning I would weigh myself and bask in the glory of the ever falling graph painted by the (back then very good) iOS app that came with the scale. I would manage to lose a very consistent 2kg (4.4lbs) per week.
Every walk I would have the chance to experience some of natures beauty.
Crazy sunsets
Beautiful sunrises
Enchanted forests
And frozen creeks
And in spring I could watch trees grow.
When I got home after up to three hours of walk, I was dead tired at around 10pm, meaning that for the first time in ages I would get more than enough sleep and I would still be able to get up between 6 and 7.
By mid of March, after 6 months of a very strict diet and walking home every day, I was done. I had lost 40kg (88.1 lbs).
Now the challenge shifted from losing weight to not gaining weight. I decided to make the diet less strict but also continue with my walks, though I would not do the regular 19km ones any more as they would just take too long (3 hours).
But by June, I really started to notice a change: I wouldn’t feel these walks at all any more. No sweat, no reasonable change in heart rate while on them, no tiredness. The walks really felt like a waste of time.
So I started running.
I never liked running. I was always bad at it. All the way through school where I was the slowest and always felt really bad afterward, through my life until now where I just never did it. Running felt bad and I hated it.
But now things were different.
The first time I changed from walking to running, I did so after reaching the peak altitude, so it was mostly straight and a little bit downhill. But still: I ran 4km (2.48 miles) and when I got home I didn’t feel much more tired.
I was very surprised because running 4km through all of my life would have been completely unthinkable to me, but there I was. I just did.
So next day, I decided to run most of the way, just skipping the steepest parts. Suddenly, there I was, running 8km (4.9 miles), still not feeling particularly tired afterwards.
So I started tracking these runs (using both Runkeeper and Strava for technical reasons – but that’s another post), seeing improvement in my time all the way through July.
And then, on August 1st, I ran half a Marathon climbing 612m (2007 feet)
Considering that this was my first, it’s not even in too bad a time and what’s even more fun to me: I didn’t even feel too tired afterwards and I totally felt like I could run even farther.
So I guess after taking it very slowly and moving from walking a bit to walking more to walking a lot to running a bit to running some more, even I, the most unathletic person possible can push myself into shape.
But what’s the most interesting aspect in all of this is that without technology, the Apple Watch in particular, without the cheesy achievements, none of this would ever have been possible. I hated sports and I’m honestly still not really interested. But the prospect of getting awarded some stupid batches every day is what finally pushed me.
And now, in only a single month, my girlfriend will finally return to Switzerland and I guess she’ll find me in better shape than she’s ever seen me before in our lives. I hope that the prospect of collecting some more batches from my watch will keep me going even when the social pressure might want to tempt me into skipping a workout.
gnegg 