Goals for 2016

As it now mid-February, it is now the time of year when I finally update you with my goals for this year. 

Recap of 2015

But before I set out my goals for the year ahead, how did I do with my goals for last year?  Well, I set out 4 goals:

1. Start running again
2. Get physically fit again
3. To develop a non-trivial side project using JavaScript.
4. Marry my girlfriend Mei.

So, tackling each in turn:

1. Running – a partial success. I did build up my running, just not as much as I had hoped.  Looking at the sub-goals:
   1. As you can see from the graph of my monthly mileage below, trying to run 80 miles a month was probably a bit too ambitious.  I averaged just over 30 miles a month over 2015, and was hitting over 45 miles per month once I got going.
   2. I ran in one Parkrun, the Ecos run in Ballymena on Saturday 10th January 2015. Frankly, this was just too big a goal, and would have meant giving up every other Saturday morning. I needed to make this goal a lot more manageable.
2. Get fit – a definite fail.
   1. My end of year score in the Five Minute Fitnes Challenge was 182, actually down on my personal best of  194.
   2. My bodyweight at the end of 2015 was 78.4 kg at around 23% body fat – very poor. I started 2015 weighing 80.7 kg.
3. Develop a side project in JavaScript – Another fail! I did have a couple of side projects on the go, specifically one to export OneNote documents into markdown format, but I never got round to completing them or releasing them, due to a lack of time and interest. I’m not too concerned about this, as I have been heavily committed to my new role since April, and have been learning a lot. But I do think this something I need to look at again this year.
4. Marry my girlfriend Mei – Yes!! Mei and I married in the summer at St. Patrick’s church in Coleraine. The massive dip in my monthly running mileage was caused by the August wedding (and associated stress) and our honeymoon cruise to Norway.

So, based on a very mixed bag of results for last year’s goals, what about this year?  The main lessons I learnt from last year was to focus on a single big goal, and to be realistic about what you can achieve. Funnily enough, it is not the first time I’ve learnt the same lessons. So for this year:

1. Continue to focus on my running
   1. Run 12 Parkruns by end of 2016 – a slightly more realistic target!
   2. To be running 60 miles per month by the end of the year
2. Focus on my blog
   1. To blog a new article monthly, and to start focusing on generating more technical content for my blog.
   2. Migrate my blog away to a new blogging platform. Blogger was a good platform to start on back in March 2010, but it is definitely showing its age.  It is time for a blog makeover!!
   3. Make more time for blogging by giving up Twitter for the year. I enjoy Twitter and I have some good conversations there – but I also waste a lot of time, and occasionally I get dragged down into exchanging bile and snark. I would rather spend the time on something more meaningful and long term, like my blog and other side projects. I’ll occasionally post links to my own content on Twitter, but otherwise I’ll be avoiding it.

As usual, even if I don’t achieve my goals, I’ll hopefully learn or achieve something worthwhile.

Five Minute Fitness Test

In a previous post, I mentioned one of my goals for this year was to achieve a score of 250+ in the Five Minute Fitness Test. In this post, I’m going to describe the fitness test I’ll be using.

I came across the test in The Para Fitness Guide by Sam McGrath, the former Head of Parachute Training and Selection. If you’re interested in bodyweight training and getting in shape, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  I’m particularly like this test as requires no equipment and can be done anywhere. And, as it depends on bodyweight only, it is good way to compare your relative muscular endurance over time.

The test is as follows:

• Press-ups – as many reps in 60 seconds
• Rest for 10 seconds
• Sit-ups (feet secured) - as many reps in 60 seconds
• Rest for 10 seconds
• Star Jumps - as many reps in 60 seconds
• Rest for 10 seconds
• Squat Thrusts – as many Reps in 60 seconds
• Rest for 10 seconds
• Burpees – as many reps in 60 seconds

In the book, the following fitness scale is used based on your combined score for the above exercises:

Fitness Level	Basic	Recruit	Soldier	Paratrooper
Score	0-99	100-199	200-264	265+

So far, my best score for the test is 194, so I still have some work to do to break 250+. 

Fair warning, this test is a lot tougher than it sounds. I strongly recommend taking it easy the first time you try it. I generally do this test once a week.  But I recently came across another Five Minute Fitness Test, and I have started alternating between the two for variety.

Podcasts

A few weeks ago, Toby Osbourn and Chris Laughlin blogged about the podcasts that they were currently listening to. I thought I better do the same, so here are my current podcasts:

Programming

Hanselminutes – A weekly podcast hosted by Scott Hanselman that covers web development and technology, with a particular emphasis on Microsoft and .NET development (Scott being a web developer working as part of the Web Platform Team at Microsoft).  Always worth a listen, it covers the major new technologies from the point of view of a developer.  A good mix of guests, and a good length (around 30 minutes) makes it very easily digestible.

Herding Code – This podcast comes out every few weeks, and is hosted by K. Scott Allen (OdeToCode), Kevin Dente, Scott Koon (Lazycoder) and Jon Galloway.  The podcast format will typically have a guest being interviewed in depth on one or more programming topics, such as a new library or service, and the conversation will typically expand to include general programming topics and tech news.  Always entertaining and occasionally off the wall.

This Developer’s Life – This is another podcast from Scott Hanselman, along with Rob Connery.  This is more about challenges faced by developers (and many others) in their everyday lives.  The podcast titles give you a flavour – Cancer, Competition, Pressure, Management. Quirky, but interesting. Sadly, it looks like this podcast has come to an end. 

If you’re interested in more .NET podcasts, check out http://thesoundof.net/, an aggregator of a number of different .NET podcasts. 

CodingBlocks.NET – A podcast I’ve recently discovered, it is a programmers podcast, hosted by programmers for programmers.  The recent topics have included design Patterns, ASP.NET vNext, the static analysis tool, NDepends, choosing your technology stack, and SQL databases.

Tech News

Tech Weekly from the Guardian Technology team.  Great for keeping abreast of all the current Tech gossip. 

Miscellaneous

Get Up and Code – A podcast aimed at developers discussing fitness and nutrition, originally hosted by Iris Classon and John Sonmez. 

Kermode Film Reviews - Mark Kermode rants about the latest film releases, while Simon Mayo heroically puts up with his Trotskyite nonsense. Lively, controversial and un-missable movie discussion.

We’re Alive – The best Zombie serial podcast that you’ve never heard.  Absolutely addictive listening.

Tracking My Weight Over The Years

For the past five years, I have been recording my weight daily.  This year, I’ve finally given up on weighing myself daily, and have reduced it to weighing myself weekly.  As part of the change, I have finally combined the logs from the different years into one.  This has allowed me to track how my weight has changed over this time, and not just over a one year period.

You can draw a few conclusions immediately:

1. Despite a plateau from March 2009 to October 2010, my weight has been rising over the past few years.
2. Each year, my weight generally peaks at the end of December.
3. Despite a number of periods of brief weight loss (generally due to illness), I consistently regain and gradually increase my weight.
4. I need to lose weight.  And it is going to take time to lose it. After all, it has taken over 3 years to add it.

You can track how my weight changes via my bodyweight log.

Race Calendar - 2013

Update - June 2016

You can now find a list of all my road racing results at http://www.andyparkhill.co.uk/p/race-results.html.

Just to post a list of the races I plan on running this year.  As you can see, I’m concentrating on 10K races (not surprising given my goals for the year), and a monthly attendance at my local Parkrun.  I’m also hoping to run a few slightly longer runs.
The races below marked in bold are races I have already signed up for:

Date	Race	Distance	Result (Minutes)	Pace (MPM)
February
Saturday 16th	Portrush Parkrun 5K	5K	20:13	6:30
April
Sunday 21st	Titanic Quarter 10K	10K	42:53	6:54
May
Saturday 4th	Portrush Parkrun 5K	5K	20:55	6:44
Monday 6th	Belfast City Marathon	Team Relay C – 7.1 miles	54:00 (approx.)	7:36
Friday 17th	Les Jones Memorial 10K	10K (actually about 9.5K)	39:42	6:44
June
Saturday 8th	Larne Half Marathon	13.1 miles	96:56	7:24
Friday 14th	Active Antrim 5 Mile Road Race	5 Miles	33:34	6:43
Sunday 23rd	Great North 10K	10K	43:38	7:01
Thursday 27th	Jude Gallagher Memorial Round The Bridges 10 Mile Road Run	10 Mile Road Run	70:00	7:00
July
Saturday 6th	Portrush Parkrun 5K	5K
Saturday 20th	Kennedy Kane McArthur Festival of Running	10K
Friday 26th	NFU Mutual 5 Mile
August
Sunday 4th	The World Police & Fire Games Half Marathon	13.1
Saturday 17th	Portrush Parkrun 5K	5K
TBC	Dessie’s Run	10K
September
Sunday 22nd	Belfast City Half Marathon
December
TBC	Seeley Cup 10K

So far, the Athletics NI race calendar doesn’t go further than the end of August, but I would expect that the biggest race of the year will be the Seeley Cup 10K , which is normally held in November or December.  As well as being the Northern Ireland championship event, it will be the race in which I hope to break the 40 minutes barrier.

Two other races of note – the Newcaste Parkrun in June. and the World Police & Fire Games Half Marathon in August.  The first race will be when I visit Gateshead to be a spectator at the European Athletics Team Championships.  I was lucky enough to be in London last year for the Olympics, and I am hoping that the Championships in Gateshead can be just as exciting.

I’ll continue to update this post with my planned races, and the times of the races I actually run. You can also check out my athlete profile on the Power of 10 and Run Britain sites.

Goals for 2013

"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbours, and let every new year find you a better man."  - Benjamin Franklin

As usual, I'm late posting my goals for the new year ahead. I don't see this as being a bad thing. You should take time to consider how & what you are going to spend your limited free time on. This is particularly relevant to me as I have just started a new job with quite a long commute time.

Having looked at how I got on with 2012 goals (blog post to come), I decided to change tack completely, and to limit myself to just three goals for the coming year.

1. Break 40 minutes in a 10 kilometre road race.  My last 10K race time was 43:20 (Dessie’s Run, Derry 2012), so to get it below 40 minutes will take sustained, consistent training.  But I doubt if I’ll equal my PB of 35:15 minutes at the Seeley Cup, Belfast, some 8 years ago and when I was over a stone lighter.
2. This year, I will be making a big push to learn several new technologies in my free time. As part of this, I will post 40 articles on this blog, with the majority of the posts being technical articles.
3. To listen to 40 pieces of classical music.  I have always wanted to educate myself about great music, and I think it is about time I started.  I’ll blog soon about the various pieces I plan on listening to.

Making the Weight…

At the start of this year, I spent a lot of time analysing how I had met my goals for 2011, and setting my goals for this year.  One of those new goals was to get my weight below 70kg.

A quick look at my bodyweight log shows that my progress at the start of the year was slow but steady… Until April, when my weight jumped back up to 75Kg and it has remained consistently there ever since. 

It is pretty obvious I need some more motivation to get my weight done.  So if I get my weight below 70 kg by 1st December of this year, I’ll be taking a holiday in USA in 2013.  If I don’t make the weight, I’ll be spending a wet weekend in Portrush.  If that doesn’t motivate me to get into shape, I don’t know what will. 

You can continue to monitor my bodyweight log, and I’ll let you all at the end of the year whether I’ve achieved my weight goal.

My Personal Goals for 2012

After reviewing my goals for last year, it is time to reveal my goals for 2012:

1. Reduce my weight to under 70 kg.

Over the past few years, my weight has gradually crept up. With a tagline like “will code for cake”, how could my weight not increase?  As a software developer, my job is sedentary, and due to a chronic knee injury, my running days are over.  But this year, I’m going to lose the middle age paunch, and get back in shape.  I’m currently weighing in at 75 kg; back in my University days, when I was running and climbing daily, I weighted 68-69 kg.  I’ve already starting looking seriously at my diet, and I am exercising daily.  You can follow my progress by checking my bodyweight log – I update it daily.

2. Release a mobile application and a web application.

Over the past few months, I’ve been pretty disheartened about my career in general, and about programming in particular.  After taking some time to reflect on this, I realised it was for a very simple reason – I wasn’t doing any serious coding.  At work, I’ve spent the last 3 years working with SharePoint.  This isn’t the place for a Zed Shaw-esque rant on SharePoint development – suffice to say that the SharePoint isn’t the most stimulating platform to work with, and could definitely count as one of the most frustrating.  In particular, I’ve spent the past two months configuring SharePoint demos, as opposed to actually coding.  At home, I’ve haven’t done in serious coding on personal projects in far too long.

To get my passion for programming back again, I am going to start following Scott Hanselman’s advice and start doing more.  In particular, I will stop watching TV in the weekday evenings, and start work coding my personal projects.  As well more coding, I will be learning a new language – at the minute I'm still deciding whether to learn Python or Ruby. But my first project will be a Android application.  More news to follow soon!

3. Save 30% of my net income (in addition to pension contributions).

This follows on from my goal to increase my saving to 20% last year.  In the event, I saved 18.76% of my salary in 2011.  To increase my savings to 30% will be a major challenge, but one that will be useful to attempt, even if I fall short of the actual target.

The three goals above definitely reflect the lessons I learnt from last year’s goals.  The new goals are:

• Limited in number and scope – I’ve only got limited time and attention to focus in specific problems. So I need to focus on a small number of goals that can give the most benefit.  That is the main lesson form one of the best books I read last year – The Power of Less
  
• SMART.  I (and for goals 1 and 2, you!) will be able to track my progress.

Hopefully, I will successfully achieve all of my goals – but even if I don’t, I intend to have fun trying!