If you've met me, you might've noticed that I'm a massive fat cunt. This has been the case for all of my life, and I'm mostly happy with it. It keeps me warm in winter and if I fall overboard on a boat I'll float.
What I'm so not happy about is my level of fitness. While I've never been what you'd call 'sporty', working from home this year has absolutely destroyed what little fitness I had. It's amazing what difference the small amount of exercise I was getting during my commute must've been making. A year ago I could make it from my house to the train station in five minutes - albeit exhausted when I get there. Now it takes ten minutes, and I'm just as exhausted.
This is shit, and so I've decided to do something about it. Going out for a run/jog might seem like a good plan, but it'd be like beating my knees with hammers. I weigh around 150 KG, my old bones can't handle me stomping around like an elephant. I suppose I could go for a walk, but I live in Inverkeithing and there's fuck all here, plus I don't fancy playing 'dodge the ned'.
The other week I bought an exercise bike and a heart-rate monitor with the plan of using them to get some exercise, and also record my progress. Since I'm a proper geek I've decided to calculate a score and write a wee Rails app to record it and display a pretty graph.
The site is Fat Fucking Bastard, and I'll summarise from there how the scoring works.
My goal is to reward improving fitness, which I'm defining as being able to exercise with a high heart rate for an increasing length of time. The score is comprised of two elements: a minimum length of time I need to keep my heart rate up for and the 'distance' travelled on the exercise bike. If I don't meet the minimum length of time then my score for that session is '0', otherwise I multiply the time in minutes by the distance in metres.
I picked those factors to encourage me to exercise for longer or harder (distance) and to keep increasing the minimum duration (the system calculates when it should be increased based on my actual times) so that I'm presented with a non-trivial - but still achievable - challenge.
In time I want to add a Twitter integration so I can spam my friends - and get them to harass me when I don't exercise - but what I've got right now is enough to start gather data and drawing the graph.
Well, it will be once the bike is taken out of its box. That's planned for tomorrow, so if that graph doesn't start updating in the next few days, feel free to harass me on Twitter.