1,000 Days

One thousand days ago, I started on my experiment with Apple Watch. One of the things that has kept me going has been the idea of streaks: unbroken habits of activity. Today I celebrated not only 1000 days of meeting my activity goal, but also 1000 days of never breaking that streak:

One person's dedication is another's compulsion, and while my attitude to getting up early in the morning to get my morning exercise likely falls somehere in between, to me it represents a commitment to doing something for myself that it seems few choose to do.

Yesterday, as I was thinking about reaching 1000 days today, I started to ask myself questions about the data that has been collected for the past couple of years. I threw together some code to access my activity data and came up with some interesting stats:

Daily average of activity, in calories

Daily average of exercise, in minutes

Average of standing at least one minute in an hour per day

One easily visible data point is that, on average, I am least active on Sunday. No surprises there, but even with it being a rest day, I am still (on average) fairly active.

Another few interesting data points are when collecting the following stats for each summary type. I can tell some really interesting stories just from these:

Activity

My minimum here represents days that I have been sick and activity isn't going to be high. One these days, I would tune my daily goal down. For me a streak isn't just meeting an arbitrary number, but represents a commitment to keep things going. It isn't because I'm lazy; I physically can't move.

My maximum represents when I ran my first marathon at the end of 2016. That was a killer day that I will never forget. It represents the pinnacle of my lifestyle change and being able to do something that I never imagined that I thought possible or even desirable to do. The total of nearly 813K calories is staggering. That's a lot of energy burn!

Exercise

My minimum here, like with activity, represented days when I was sick and could not get out of bed to even walk.

My maximum of 235 minutes also corresponds to the day that I ran my marathon.

My total exercise minutes represents nearly 55 continuous days of exercise! #mindblown

Standing

My minimum here represents the first day that I got my Apple Watch. I got it very late in the evening and (obviously) couldn't wear it all day.

My maximum represents coming back from my trip to Japan. Because of the international date line, I got two Saturdays in a row where I was up and moving around for 24 hours. I never want to intentionally do that again, even though it was a lot of fun.

Entire Dataset

Here are a few fun line graphs of my overall data:

What's Next?

I have unlocked the last of the big milestone badges; maybe Apple will come out with some new ones now that non-Apple employees are starting to hit this biggest one. But if not, the goal for me is to keep my streak going. Just keeping going and going and going and going...