My plan for 2025
My fav trainer at my kickboxing gym offered to let me write some of my 2025 resolutions for the wall of same we’re apparently building out and I said, dripping sweat on the floor as I stretched, “Nah, I don’t make resolutions. I make plans.”
He liked it.
I am serious about making 2025 the best year of my life. So far, anyway. I have goals and a plan to achieve them. I also try to have enough flexibility in there to adapt to circumstances when necessary, and to grab new interesting possibilities with both hands. Sometimes the Universe (they/them) throws you something good you weren’t expecting and it would be stupid to ignore that. I do endeavour not to be stupid. It’s key to my success.
One of the things I’m planning to do a little differently this coming year is to be more deliberate about measuring indicators that matter. I’ve been very careful and deliberate in my health and fitness since — well, pretty much since forever and I do enjoy the benefits of all these years of training as I continue to hit new physical goals, not the least of which includes mastering a new sport (ultimate) in my 50s. That was part of my new year plans for 2024 and while I’m still a spectacularly ordinary player I’ve improved a lot. My frisbee goal for 2025 is to level up that improvement to the point where my performance is consistent.
But you want to know about measurements. The reason for those is aging. I’m hitting 55 near the end of 2025, entering a territory where mistakes and injuries can have long-term debilitating effects. If I’m going to keep running longish distances and doing kickboxing and playing ultimate at a good level, which I intend to do, I need to make sure the carcass can keep up.
So I measure things, starting with my sleep, which I track using my Apple Watch and a cool app called SleepWatch. I also keep track of my macros, because food is just about the most influential variable for overall health and wellness that we can all control. For this I use an app called Eató that uses AI to analyze a picture of what’s on your plate. You can also enter each thing individually but sometimes that’s just more trouble than it’s worth and I like the simplicity of the automated tool.
(I use the paid versions of both apps and while the second one is marketed as a weight-loss app you don’t have to use it that way. What I like about it, beyond the AI capabilities, is that you can set your typical diet — mine is low-carb — and it will help you stick to it with measuring but also recipes and food suggestions that line up nicely. If you just want to track your macros there are other apps for that, including many that are free.)
And then I also use the Apple Watch and another monitoring doodad to track all kinds of data related to my running and my kickboxing. In particular I pay close attention to how fast my heart rate comes down after intense work. The faster you recover from near-exhaustion, the fitter you are. I enjoy being very fit, which is a crucial part of any year being my best yet.
I’m also implementing new routines to keep my artistic muscles in shape beyond morning pages — the closest thing I have to a religion. This year I plan to work on my fiction every single day (even if it’s just five minutes), and to doodle, too. The latter is not super ambitious at the moment, beyond scratching some sketch paper. The idea is to allow creativity to roam in different directions. I don’t know whether it’ll work but I’m going to give it a try for a year.
And finally, in my new year column for the Ottawa Citizen I say we’re going to need to gird our loins and tap into our strategic reserves of kindness to make 2025 the best we can. I also, perhaps mischievously, use that excuse to bring back an idea whose time I believe has come: Remaking the constitutional order to get rid of provinces. No, really. Being mischievous is very much part of my plan for 2025.
Happy new year, y’all.
