Beware of the Train

1. Start tracking my weight and calorie intake again, and get my weight back down to a level where I'm comfortable. I've been very slack on the actual calorie-tracking, but I have lost nearly a stone, and at the moment I'm bobbing along between 11st and about 11st 4lb. It would be nice to be below 11st, but I find I'm actually pretty comfortable at this weight as long as I'm doing enough exercise. So, I count that as a success.

2. Start making (and testing!) regular backups of my data. I'm now backing up my tweets with TweetBackup.com, but other than that I've made no progress on this front. Possibly my real failure was in not making all my NYRs SMART, so they'd all be pass/fail; as it is, I'm going to declare this one not yet successful.

3. Get my Gmail account down to Inbox Zero and keep it there. This one's a resounding success. Took me about a month and a half, IIRC. Next up: Browser Tab Zero.

4. Do some more Stanford online courses. There was a long period at the beginning of the year where they weren't running and we wondered if the Stanford administrators had stepped in and quietly deep-sixed the project, but then they suddenly started up again in March or so. Since then I've done Design and Analysis of Algorithms, which was brilliant; Software Engineering for Software as a Service, which I dropped out of 2/3 of the way through but somehow had amassed enough points to pass anyway; and I'm currently doing Compilers (hard but brilliant) and Human-Computer Interaction, which is way outside my comfort zone and on which I'm struggling. Fundamentals of Pharmacology starts up in a couple of weeks, and Cryptography starts sooner than that, but I don't think I'll be able to do Cryptography before Compilers finishes. Maybe next time they offer it. Anyway, I think this counts as a success.

5. Enter and complete the Meadows Half-Marathon. This was a definite success: I completed the 19.7km course in 1 hour and 37 minutes, and raised over £500 for the Against Malaria Foundation.

6. Enter (and, ideally, complete...) the Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon. This was last weekend; my partner and I entered the C category. Our course covered 41km, gained 2650m of height, and mostly consisted of bog, large tufts of grass, steep traverses, or all three at once; we completed it in 12 hours and 33 minutes over two days and came 34th out of a hundred or so competitors. I was hoping for a faster time, but I think that's not too bad for a first attempt. Being rained on for the last two hours was no fun at all, but the worst bit was definitely the goddamn midges, which were worse than either of us had ever seen before. The itching's now just about subsided, and we're thinking of entering another one at a less midgey time of year: possibly the Original Mountain Marathon in October or the Highlander Mountain Marathon next April. Apparently the latter has a ceilidh at the mid-camp, presumably in case anyone's feeling too energetic. Anyway, this one's a success.

5/6 - I'm quite pleased with that. And I'm going to add another one (a mid-year resolution, if you will): I notice that my Munro-count currently stands at 136/284 (thanks to an excellent training weekend hiking and rock climbing on Beinn a' Bhuird); I hereby vow to have climbed half the Munros in Scotland by the end of the year. Six more to go; should be doable.