My complete 2022 stats are in! Exercise! Sleeping! Eating! Drinking! (Not much of that, mercifully, apart from two or three slips.) Planes! Trains! But not automobiles! A wealth of fascinating data.
I obsess over my stats, analysing, finessing, averaging, every day of the week, with subtotals every week of the year. Having accepted long ago that no great archivist in the sky is omnisciently recording my earthly existence, I’ve been doing it myself for decades. It helps foster the illusion that I have control over my life, when the truth is, like everyone, most stuff that happens to me is pretty random.
Knowledge of the running averages also serves as an incentive: if I do X more steps today, I’ll be averaging 12,000 for the week etc. Plus, recording all this data – old-school, longhand, in a notebook – means I can use different coloured felt pens for different subjects. Last but not least, it’s something to do. I might almost call it my hobby.
In green, for walking, I’ve averaged 5.75 miles a day, which for me is just about bang on 13,000 steps. I tried to average six, and managed it for half a year, but eventually the detached anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee, ruptured seven years ago in a career-ending game of five-a-side, protested too much. Also, there’s only so much walking around the bedroom in circles as midnight approaches that my wife can take.
It’s a shame to fall short of the big six for want of walking an extra quarter of a mile, or four minutes, a day. And yet, having pushed your body to the very limit of its abilities, you have to accept when you’ve hit the buffers.
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In an uncannily exact parallel with those sensible climbers who backtrack at 28,000ft just short of the summit of Everest, having judged the light or the weather makes it too risky to press on, I chose to prioritise my health (well, my knee) and my marriage over some arbitrary target.
Or, to pick another example that isn’t in the least bit absurdly self-aggrandising, my restraint was analogous to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s decision in 1909 when, just 112 miles away from becoming the first person to reach the South Pole, he decided to turn back with rations running low. He knew he would probably make it. He also knew he’d probably die on the return journey, as Captain Scott did three years later. Sometimes, discretion is the better part of valour.
Two wheels were less impressive than two feet: four miles covered, noted in purple pen. Not four miles a day. Not even four miles a week, which itself would be risible. But four miles in total. Which is one hundredth of a mile per day. When people I haven’t seen for ages ask me, “Still cycling then?” by way of an ice-breaker I now have to answer, “Er, no.” Like those people who say they only admire a famous band’s early work, at the precise moment cycling returned from the fringe to the mainstream, I gave it up.
I might as well stop recording my cycling. It’s a waste of time and ink writing “zero” every day. I don’t record my stilt-walking, pogo stick or cartwheeling mileage.
Gym (red) is down, but swimming (light blue) is way, way up. Eighty swims for the year at an average of 14 lengths of the London Fields lido, which is 50m long. I’m happy with that, especially as all 80 were condensed into just five months. More than happy, in fact; I’m delighted. As a fat kid, swimming was the one sport I excelled at as a youngster. The extra buoyancy must have helped. Only up to a point, of course, otherwise Adam Peaty would be built like a darts player.
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Flights, post-Covid, are back up to ten, which is about average for the past 30 years. Trains, despite Mick Lynch’s best efforts, are 26, again bang on normal. Provocations notwithstanding, I continue to love trains and am happy to see their total rise. I’m never quite sure, however, whether journeys by aeroplane is a total I should be looking to increase or lower. On the one hand it still feels kinda glam to fly a lot, especially for work, pretending to be an international homme d’affaires, failing to flirt with the stewardess, imagining you have a favourite restaurant in New York etc. Then again, actual flying, being uncomfortable, poisonous and frightening, sucks in every way imaginable.
I’m similarly conflicted about nights away from home – 80 last year, back to normal. On paper, in theory, it’s good to get out and about. Different cultures, different cities, different countries – it doesn’t do to be a stick-in-the-mud. In practice, the different places I go are always the same places – southwest France, east Kent, East Yorkshire, west Wales, so I might as well be in my own bed. This year, I fancy chalking up a few new locations.
robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk
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