Mentally, I’ve very much enjoyed not wearing my Apple Watch daily. Physically, I’ve fallen way behind on my general fitness when I don’t track the circles. This week I decided to do something about that.

On Monday, I met with a personal trainer at Lifetime Fitness and took a tour of the Target Center club. We talked quite a bit about my past history and what I think I want to do this year, which is basically get back in running shape and lose weight.

While I elected not to hire him now as my personal trainer, here’s my current plan:

• Bought new running and gym shoes (and a new gym bag).
• Started back on the nightly treadmill hill walk with hand weights while watching shows from the list on the iPad.
• Preparing to run the Get in Gear 10K on April 27, the Milk Run 5K on May 25 and the TC 10 Mile on October 6. And if I get extra motivated, maybe the Afton 25K on July 6 too.
• Looking forward to the bike trails drying out – want to increase that cross training this year. Might add the bike attachment to Oliver’s roof rack.
• Planning to walk every golf round this year (like usual).
• Thinking about getting another weight bench to go with my dumbbell set.
• Utilize my access to Lifetime for indoor running, stair machine cardio, a return to racquetball, explore new classes and learn to be a better swimmer.

My schedule makes all of this challenging, but you need to prioritize what’s important, right?

Thanks to the social media manager in my office, I’m now back on the Gram. She has a goal to increase Instagram followers, so I registered @7minutemiles as a private account, followed @targetcentermn and started looking at the current state of that platform. As some of you may recall, I used to be @kingsbury for years and Colleen had her account stolen by a hacker (Meta support was not helpful).

It’s really amazing to me how much content is generated exclusively for Instagram, especially in the food world. Sports and entertainment is also still going strong and I’m slowly re-discovering golf, skiing and regional travel accounts (Meta appears to limit new accounts to 100 follows a day now). A few people have discovered my new account and sent follow requests, but I’m not sure how much I will publish there.

As Cory Doctorow wrote, now is the moment for POSSE – Post Own Site, Share Everywhere. IndieWeb has also written a lot about POSSE, which I had already started to try recently on both Bluesky and Mastodon. Need to think through this a little more, as I never liked when people would just post the same stuff everywhere.

Still really love the idea of people publishing their own sites and content – whether that is a small business website, a personal blog or something else. What I do here is neither free nor easy, but there are options out there for people if you look. The vast majority of people, however, will likely continue to use services like Instagram and TikTok as their only home to the content they create and publish.

As someone who basically dropped off all social media for a time to focus on my personal site, getting eyeballs on your content is infinitely harder, FOMO is strong and with comments disabled on my site, two-way communication is definitely hindered. And as Zeldman says, “go where the people are.”

Still, people like Jason Kottke remain great examples of self-publishing ideas and implementation. I love reading his posts like this one on the latest kottke.org site redesign. My RSS reader follow list hasn’t changed much over the years, but there is still some great stuff that pops up in there from people like Teri Kanefield, Brian Krebs, Charles Edge, Tom Bricker, Mistletunes and Phil Roberts.

Back on the platforms, I got to explore Threads with the new Instagram account and didn’t see a lot of personal value there. The “For You” view was awful and the “Following” option showed that most activity on accounts I care about is remaining on the Instagram side.

I still enjoy reading content on Mastodon via Ivory, which remains the closest experience to what I had with Twitter and Tweetbot. Recently learned I can follow tags there and have been enjoying the “SKIING” tag a lot. Also like Bluesky, but wish I could use a Tapbots app for that service instead of the website.

Instagram on the web is much better than before, but I’ll probably get back to using the iOS app again once I have the full follow list in place. Still happy I hibernated my LinkedIn – it will be there if I need it in the future, but don’t miss it day to day…

It’s been three weeks now since I stopped wearing my Apple Watch daily. My physical health is holding steady, as I still try to get on the treadmill to walk semi-regularly in this cold weather. My mental health, however, is vastly improved without the stress and anxiety of closing the damn rings. I still use the watch during workouts, but otherwise happy to leave it on the charger for the time being…

The patent infringement craziness has certainly made a big impact on the current Apple Watch market. Looking back through the 7 Minute Miles archives, it appears I’ve been an Apple Watch user now for nearly seven years. My longest move streak during the pandemic was almost 1200 days. Closing my rings and earning awards has been a daily goal. I’d planned on eventually replacing my old Series 5 with an Ultra 2 (temporarily unbanned, pictured above). And yet…

Today my wrist is naked.

My latest move streak ended due to illness and the last few days have felt freeing, as I wasn’t worried about closing the damn rings. So as I start the first week of 2024, I thought I’d try leaving the watch on the charger and see what happens. So far I’ve tried to check on the time a half dozen times, but like having app notifications just on my phone again. Would definitely want to wear it to track workouts (like I used to do with my Garmin) and I do like the always on safety features like fall detection and heart rate monitoring.

Hmm… 🤔

After giving Fubo the old college try the last few weeks, I decided to “pause” that account for six months. The quality of the interfaces, overall performance of the app and the lack of PBS, TNT and TBS aren’t enough to offset the lack of Bally on YouTubeTV, IMO.

Going to try out Fubo for a few days and see if we want to switch from YouTubeTV. Access to Bally is the big one (Wild, Timberwolves, Twins), but 4K is included in Fubo Elite too. Both have DVR and Apple device support, so need to review overall cost and quality of apps…