Climbing stairs in 2020

Last year one of my goals was to do 10 minutes of exercise every day (generally some sort of yoga or stretching routine) and get my 10,000 steps. I managed to do it every day without fail . . . until late July when my knee freaked out on me and I missed a couple days. Having broken my streak, I declared it all a failure and never went back.

I do love the motivational power of a good streak. My nephew Ethan and I are almost up to 1000 days with our Snapchat streak, and I'm approaching 800 days of working on my Duolingo German lessons. But snapping a quick picture or spending 5 to 10 minutes doing German exercises (both generally in bed as soon as I wake up) is one thing. Exercising is another. Sometimes knees hurt. Sometimes it rains or I'm traveling or whatever, and the power of a broken streak can be dreadfully demotivating.

This year my fitness goal is to climb 20 flights of stairs (as counted on my Apple Watch) nearly every day. This shouldn't be too hard for me to do--I live in a 3-story house and work on the third floor of a building with many more floors. On days when I'm in the office and need to go to the first floor, I climb up several flights first before taking the elevator down; then I climb back up to my desk. On days when I'm home, I set the timer on my watch for 30 minutes intervals and run to the basement and back each time it goes off.

I decided to track my progress with an iPhone app called Strides. This app does track streaks, both a current streak and whatever my longest streak happens to be. But it also shows an overall percentage of days on which I have met my goal, and it colors in each day that the goal is met, kind of like a child's sticker chart.

Here's my January:



And here's my February so far:



You can see from the overview in the iPhone Health app that so far this year, my daily average of flights climbed has gone way up:



I think of my 94% score as a nice, solid A.