2020 Goals Update

In my last post I said this one would follow in a few days; that it’s been closer to two weeks is a good indication of how life is going at the moment. I set myself some new annual goals back in February and this is the first time I’ve gotten around to reviewing progress.

One. The forever delayed podcast. Still forever delayed. I have plenty of plans but other stuff just gets in the way.

Two. Strength & Fitness. I’ve made some good progress with the weights set I got for Christmas, especially since lockdown began. I now wish I’d bought more weights than I did as it’s been impossible getting hold of extra plates from Decathlon. I’ve found some really good workouts on Youtube that make use of dumbbells, barbells and floor exercises, and have been doing programmes between twenty-five and forty-five minutes around four times a week. I did have a slight setback early last week when I strained my back, and was initially concerned about a recurrence of an old sciatic disc injury, but I’ve made a good recovery since and have started to build back up resistance again. On the running front I’ve been going out two or three times a week, doing 5k at least once a week. I managed a personal best of under thirty-nine minutes a couple of weeks ago, but so far haven’t managed to get beyond 5k.

Three. Stabilise weight at 100kg. This is one area I have gone backwards. Two months ago, before lockdown, I was 104kg, now I’m 106kg. A quarter to a half of that weight may be muscle gain from regular lifting, but at least half is fat or at best water retention. The lockdown has made it very difficult to maintain intermittent fasting and time restricted eating. I’m working from home full time, my wife and kids are also home, the successful diet routine just doesn’t fit. It’s not that I’ve been binge eating, but I’m eating three meals and a snack on most days (the kids have been doing a lot of home baking). I’ve also been drinking more beer, not every day and not binging, but as I don’t have to get up at six most mornings and there’s rarely any place I need to drive, there’s no real barrier to unwinding with a few cold ones. Hopefully, if I can keep my fitness up, I can restart my diet once my routine allows.

Four. Improve Technical Knowledge. I’ve been doing some cool stuff with DAX and Power BI at work, and I recently took part in a week long hack using telemetry data where I used PowerApps for the first time. It was genuinely interesting and with a bit of support from Microsoft I built a mobile app that wrote back to a SQL Server database. The plan was also to look at streaming data in Power BI for the first time, but unfortunately the hack was cut short due to the pandemic and the longer-term project it was queuing up has been paused for a few months. I’m hoping I’ll be put back on it when it does restart. It looked like I might get furloughed at the end of last week, instead I’ve been reassigned to a different team, which is not a bad thing as I’m going to be exposed to Azure Data Explorer and Azure Synapse for the first time.