2023 Recap

Note: I did a separate post looking at Intro Maker stuff for 2023 and another post detailing my favorite New Stuff of last year.

This post is "everything too small to fit in its own post"—blogging, travel, health+hobbies, garden.

Blogging

I go through weird blogging phases. Sometimes I post here, sometimes I post on Twitter, sometimes I post on reddit/forums. I posted a bunch of IntroCave stuff on Indie Hackers for awhile, then switched over to the Intro Maker blog/newsletter. I got a little sad when I sat down to write these last few posts because I only wrote ONE post in 2023! I didn't tweet a whole lot either, but it was more than one post. So I moved all the Intro Maker tweet threads from Twitter/X over to the blog.

Moving content out of Twitter turns out to be a giant pain in the ass. I tried to automate it with a copy.ai workflow (scrape content, download pictures, format in markdown), but Twitter locks down all the content. I ended up moving them by hand.

It's a strong incentive to go the other way this year—long posts on the blog with a single tweet pointing at my post.

Travel

2024 was a "Big Trip" year. We usually take a lot of long weekends and a 3-4 weeklong trips, but this year we did big spurts of travel. Other than those 2 trips, we basically took no time off. I'm personally a fan of more small trips, but going to Asia or Hawaii is not worth it for a small trip.

On our big summer trip, we did a week in Japan and two weeks in Taiwan (driving a loop all the way around the island!).

Japan

Japan highlights:

• Deer in Naara
• Temples Galore
• SUP on Lake Biwa and biking around it
• 8yo brought a duffel bag of stuffies home

Taiwan

Taiwan Highlights:

• Drove the whole island in a party bus!
• SUP on Sun Moon Lake
• Surfing in Kenting
• Taroko Gorge
• Watching rice planting
• Winning a stuffie with toy bows at a night market
• Swimming in Ramune (a cold carbonated spring that used to be used for Ramune, anyway)

Maui

We did 10 days in Hawaii for Christmas. Highlights:

• Haleakala sunrise
• Molokini snorkeling (saw humpbacks from the boat!)
• drove the whole Road to Hana on Christmas day (a long way to drive to find out the 7 pools are closed for swimming!)
• Ate a bunch of loco moco and tuna poke

Random other trips

• a long weekend near Hooker Falls in North Carolina

• working remotely from St George Island during fall break

Health / Diet / Exercise

Supplement/drugwise, I'm trying Pendulum's Akkermansia probiotic. My doctor told me to keep an eye out for FDA approval on Zepbound and we got in early on it. I'm on my second week now, but not much to notice yet.

Not much has changed since my check-in in August for exercise. I took most of Q4 (well, Sept-Nov) off from cardio and gained 10 lbs (up around 260 when we came back from Hawaii). I was feeling pretty burnt out on exercise towards the end of last year, but I've been going pretty hard for over three years straight now!

Rowing

I started rowing again last year in February and alternated time with Beat Saber for cardio.

I log all my rows and ended the year at 136 miles over 30 workouts with an average 500m pace of around 02:19. The last time I made a go at rowing was 2019. I could only row ~20 minutes at a 2:35 pace back then with almost no conditioning. It turns out that 2 years of Beat Saber + 1 year of weightlifting did actually get me in better shape. Powering through a 40-60 minute workout isn't easy, but I can stubbornly muscle my way through instead of being completely gassed after 2 miles.

I used Rowing Level for a benchmark before I built out my own spreadsheet, and I still use it for their "tier" guide. I was significantly worse than "Beginner" (02:22 pace) back in 2019, but finished 2023 right on the cusp of "Novice" (02:11 pace).

I didn't set any goals last year, but I'm going to set a goal this year of rowing 500 miles. I average more than 5 miles on a 40-minute row right now and plan on rowing twice a week. It's unlikely I'll be able to row for 50/52 weeks (I already took the first week off!), so I'll either need to start rowing 60 minutes instead of 40 or just row faster.

I want to be on the cusp of "Intermediate" by this time next year, which would mean a 2:03 pace. I hit 2:09 this morning over 40 minutes, so it seems pretty doable!

Beat Saber

I plan to play Beat Saber at least twice a week this year, but no hard goals. This is as much mediation/therapy as it is cardio and also fills the "high heartrate" activity slot.

Beat Saber vs Rowing

I had a "probably-obvious-to-other-people" realization very recently. I'll often say something to the effect of "I can slog through a row for 40 minutes and burn 400 calories or have fun playing Beat Saber for 40 minutes and burn 600 calories."

Expertise is the difference.

If I applied the same RowingLevel categories to Beat Saber (Beginner / Novice / Intermediate / Advanced / Elite), I'm pretty sure I'd be in the Elite category for Beat Saber. At the Beginner level, rowing burns 600 calories/hour (10/minute ). At the Elite level, rowing burns 1200 calories/hour (20/minute). The same 40-minute row would be 800 calories/hour. Rowing matches Beat Saber for calories somewhere between Intermediate/Advanced. The main reason I added rowing in the first place was that I felt like I'd hit a ceiling on Beat Saber. My average heartrate over a workout started going down, and Expert+ is as high as the thing goes!

Rowing has a much higher ceiling, but I have to remind myself that I'm starting from (near) the bottom.

Kettle Bells + X3

I tried a bunch of different rotations (3/week x 6 exercise, 5/week x 3 exercise, 3/week x 4 exercise) in 2023, but I am going try cutting back to a single ful-body routine once a week for 2024. I did my first "compound" routine (Squat, Deadlift, Kettlebell Swing, Curl -> Shoulder Press, Skullcrusher -> Chest Press) this morning. It's basically a 7-workout set, but I find doing the arm/chest stuff two at a time to be way less miserable.

This a reduction in resistance training compared to last year, but rowing is a lot more full-body than Beat Saber. I may need to adjust this one.

Paddling

With the big summer trip last year, we actually didn't do a ton of paddling. More padding in 2024! Diana just ordered a new paddleboard, so I expect we'll drag Ruby all over this summer.

Archery

I was working on my 4th adult outdoor archery pin when daylight savings hit. I can't shoot at 50m in the dark, so I've been working on indoor pins. I've gotten the first two indoor (18m) pins with scores of 209 and 230, so I should continue to rack up pins each time we go to practice until I hit the 5th (220) or 6th (240) pins.

Rock Climbing

I take the 11yo to the indoor rock climbing gym once a week and climb a few autobelays once he's gassed. In 3-4 years, he'll be big enough to belay me!

The Schedule

Rough schedule for 2024 (or at least through Q1):

• Monday: row 45 minutes
• Tuesday: beat saber 45 minutes, climbing
• Wednesday: full-body kettle bells
• Thursday: beat saber 45 minutes, archery
• Friday: row 45 minutes
• Saturday: off (but hopefully weekend warrior shit)
• Sunday: off

I should be able to squeeze in a 30-minute sauna session on most weekdays after each workout if I can get started early enough.

Total: 180+ minutes cardio, ~45 minutes weights

It feels like a lot, but it definitely paid off in 2023. We had several 10-mile+ days in Japan/Taiwan/Maui and I'm in better shape now at 40 that at any time during my 30s.

Garden

We completely rebuilt our garden in 2024, ditching the wood-enclosed raised beds for dirt rows (still raised, but just raked into place). Instead of ten 4x4 boxes (160 sq ft), we now have nine 2x10 rows (180 sq ft) with a walking path in between each. We ran a long soaker hose all throughout for watering.

We had ambitious plans – 1 bed of sugar peas (failed), 1 bed of gailan (too slow), 1 bed of bok choy (harvested + eaten!), 1 bed of french breakfast radishes (harvested + eaten!), 1 bed of red fire orach (new crop – rabbits), 1 bed of corn salad (new crop – rabbits), 1 bed of chives and other herbs (failed), and 2 beds of tomatoes (too slow).

I did get a little bit of radishes and corn salad for lunch salads, but rabbits ate most of them (we later fenced in the garden). We've had terrible luck with sugar peas and will likely skip those going forward.

Everything else was too slow! We were out of town for almost all of July and the garden was in total disarray when we got back.

Out of our 9 crops, we harvested ~2.5 (half credit on the corn salad).

Aerogarden

I had better luck with the Aerogarden indoors. I tried a few other varieties (arugula, raddichio) without much luck, but red leaf lettuce and buttercrunch lettuce continue to do well indoors. I meant to keep a tally of how many salads I got out of it during the year, but I forgot.

I let it die while we were in Hawaii and have been slow getting it going this year, but I'm hoping to do at least 4 plantings this year. If I harvested more agressively, I think I could probably do closer to 8.