I’ve done these annual reviews of my health/fitness/longevity journey every year going back to 2017. Every year it is the same lament about how off track I was most of the year. Last year was the first year where I had the better part of a year in a solidly performing zone. This year is the first one where I had an entire year in the solidly performing zone, having extended the fitness reboot I started in April of 2023 all the way through to the end of 2024. A perfect performance? Absolutely not. But perfect is the enemy of good enough, and I’m celebrating the win for what it is: a solid step towards improving the odds of having a good long healthspan. Not only that I started the year saying I was hoping to maybe run a half marathon strongly. Instead by the end of the year I ran two half marathons strongly, not counting training runs of equal or longer distances, and ran a marathon with a pretty solid performance as well.

When I wrote down my short and long term running goals back in April I didn’t think I’d realistically be able to knock out my two shorter term goals in the same year: running a half marathon strong and a full marathon strong. I knew I’d get the half done because I had one scheduled for that month but I wasn’t sure if I’d finish it strong. I did finish it strong. Completely a full marathon in 2024 seemed like a bridge too far so I was giving myself to the end of 2025. Talking with my coach towards the end of summer she thought it was totally doable for sometime in December. So here I am two weeks out from running a marathon for the second time in my life. This time I am going to say I ran it pretty strong, albeit not perfectly. Compared to my first marathon it was a huge success and one I’m going to chalk up as being a win. I therefore was able to knock out both of these short term running goals all in the same year!

Flutter architecturally is pretty agnostic about how one wires the state and business logic into the Flutter UI. It has no “standard” way of doing it although it does provide the foundational architecture to build declarative UIs. Most people use a framework on top of that to achieve it in a more intuitive and streamlined way. One such popular framework is Riverpod , “A Reactive Caching and Data-binding Framework”. I’ve recently switched from another framework to this and have enjoyed the experience a lot. However there are some nuances to the nature of the lifecyle of the components which I have found myself getting confused on half way through an implementation. These aren’t complicated concepts when looked at in isolation. It’s just something that I keep having to “relearn” if I haven’t seen it in awhile.

I thought it’d be good to document it for myself, and by extension for anyone else. This won’t cover the basics of Riverpod like setup, design pattern best practices, et cetera. except as needed to explore the concept of the lifecycle of the Riverpod components. Also, I am not a Riverpod expert so this is my relative new-to-the-framework point of view as well. If anything stands out to experts as being an over-simplification to the point of being wrong or adding confusion to what is happening please ping me on my socials. You can find the completed demo in this GitLab repo directory

May proved to be more of a struggle to keep things at a high level of performance. Some things, like a COVID relapse causing me to be more cautious on ramping up working out, explain part of it. Some things are me trying to transform my working out into something more focused on running performance but with side effects. Others are me just feeling more slack this month. Overall it wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t at the level I have been at.

April was supposed to be an easier month for me. That turned out to be kind of true. Goal Accountability grades definitely reflect that. I’m happy with the performance.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a few months now. Each time I want to commit it to “paper” I’m afraid I’m going to jinx myself by actually writing it down. My primary focus when it comes to exercise is extending my healthspan. Everything else is secondary to that. I can’t deny, though, that I get a charge out of distance running. I love the personal competition aspect. I love seeing how my body can adapt to the challenges. I like having a sense of accomplishment when I succeed. I like spending time doing the planning, tracking, and analysis. If at some point it interferes with my longevity/healthspan goals I’ll stop. In the mean time though I am enjoying being able to rejoin the recreational distance running world in a way I thought may have been solely a brief moment of my past. While I try to approach it with daily/weekly goals for personal satisfaction I can’t help but think about larger goals to target as well. In this post I want to lay out short and long term goals. If I achieve none of them but still stay constistent with my fitness regime then I would still be satisfied. Hitting them is just icing on top of that.

When I had my first bout of getting into running in the 2011/2012 period it was clear to me that I should have some sort of benchmark to measure my progress. While it was possible to measure VO2Max and heart rate zones with an expensive test I didn’t want to rely on that. Instead I devised my own running fitness test that I could repeatably do over time to see changes in my cardiovascular fitness. I am now nearly a year from the beginning of my health reboot and nine months since starting to incorporate running into that. I have been doing running training pretty consistently since August. It started off as relatively high intensity running workouts. Starting in October I shifted to a very Zone 2, low heart rate zone, style of training. After slacking off a bit in the end of year holiday period I buckled down starting at the end of January. I’ve been making slow but study progress ever since.

For years I’ve wondered if I could ever get to those cardiovascular fitness highs again. With this very different training style than what I applied before I was thinking I may be sacrificyng shorter term “faster” cardio performance levels for better base building. Having now performed the test again I think I actually am getting both at the same time. In fact I think I am almost at the same performance I was at in my best trained times.

I knew going into March that there would be challenges meeting or exceeding how well I did in February. The month was as full of travel and stressors as I had anticipated, maybe even more so. I’m pleased to report that while I didn’t maintain my February good grades across the board I was able to keep it together more than I did in January.