Fitness is not a new concept for me. It started at home - my Dad was a police officer and used jogging to stay in shape and deal with stress. He was quite a good road racer and has too many 10K races to count, plus a wide assortment of half marathons and a full. In University, I was good friends with football players and used to go to the gym with them. In fact, this is kind of a hilarious story but I learned how to do squats at home from a very gifted offensive lineman with a curling broom. One of my favourite bosses was a CrossFit trainer.
But it would never quite stick because I had three overwhelming problems. I am really obsessive, love computers and by nature the love of computers leads to many sedentary hours. Food is my other great passion. And I had a bad habit of overdoing exercise, getting injured and then not getting back into it once I recovered.
When my kid was born, my weight went into the stratosphere or perhaps more accurately, my build became the biggest argument against opening an All You Can Eat buffet. I joke because it almost killed me.
One day, my kid and I were out at a playground. I hadn’t been feeling great - it was a hard to describe mix of exhaustion and general unwell but it was summer and I had a toddler. While I was putting her back into the van after our play session, I got this feeling. For years, the best description I could give was that it felt wrong. My chest had been hurting for a long time, but that feeling went through my shoulders and forearms. My chest itself felt kind of like there was an elephant inside of me struggling to get out.
I did what any rational personal would do - I drove home, sat down at my laptop and started writing code. Luckily, my partner’s dad had had heart problems and she recognized the signs. And being much much more intelligent than I am, she told me I should likely go to emergency but that I should at least call the HealthLine to ask a nurse.
The nurse asked me a few questions and then said, “Here’s what I want you to do. Hang up the phone, call 911, tell them you’re having a heart attack and wait for the ambulance.”
So again, I did what any rational person would do. I loaded up my kid and my partner in the van and drove to the hospital.
The hospital actually started off kind of boring…until the results of one of my tests came back. Then holy crap balls, it changed. If you’ve never been the patient in an actual emergency medical situation, you likely can’t even imagine this. But it’s more like getting whisked into a very well calibrated machine than anything I would associate with going to the doctor. A whole team descends…and all of a sudden, you’re in a gown with what seems like all of NASA plugged into you.
There is a six hour span in here that I don’t write about. It’s not a lack of respect or a lack of gratitude for the people who took care of me. There are three particular individuals who I will always love an incredible amount for what they did. But writing about the past puts me back in the past and some pasts just aren’t worth revisiting.
And then I was in the cardiac surveillance unit. That place was life changing. My angiogram was particularly life changing. It was my first real surgery and the first time I had ever encountered a 3% chance that I would die. There’s a weird thing about probability. A 3% chance of something good happening is way too low to bet on. A 3% chance of something bad happening is too high to consider the 97%. There was this long moment when I held my hand on my little girl’s face where I know that the nurses tasked with wheeling me into the catheterization lab wished they had called in sick that day.
My cardiologist who did the angiogram may be the coolest human who has ever lived. When I talk about the people who I really owe, she is certainly one of them. The day before when I met her, I told her that I was really scared and I think she did the single most kind thing anyone has ever done for me. She gave my hand this encouraging little squeeze and said, “Don’t worry, for me this is like giving a haircut and I’ll give you a little something to take the edge off.”
When I got into the room where they were going to poke me in the heart, Man on the Moon by REM was playing. If you know me, you know about my REM obsession - it has lasted from my pre teens through my adult life. And, in that moment Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe gave me hope despite the times. Then I was given this drug.
In my younger days, I really enjoyed substances but I have never been so high in my entire life. When my cardiologist said that she would take the edge off, I had no idea she meant that she would remove the very concept of an edge from my existence. Within moments, the world had become a big pillow and all the children of the world had linked arms and started singing “Driver 8”.
To the poor people who looked after me post surgery - I apologize for everything I did and said. I know that I kept forgetting my arm had been frozen so I kept telling you that I think I had had a stroke and I know it was really annoying.
A few days later, I got out of the hospital and was scared to death. My own actions had put me in there and my own choices were the only things that could get me out. The thought that I had had all these opportunities through the years to avoid my genes but chose not chased me. And I started writing fitnesstracker mostly as a way to convince myself I could write code again without ending up in the hospital.
It started off as a way to time and track Tabatas without interrupting the music I was listening to. Within a few weeks, I added the ability to track my walking distance and time. And then, seemingly out of desperation to test whether my heart could handle a lot of stress, I started working on hardware integrations and a mobile app.
How can I describe that? I think the best way is to say that I have owned a few cardiac monitors that I believe were designed to turn their developers into users. However to their credit, I believe they did design the world’s most perfect random number generators - 10% of the time they would spit out totally random data to the point that a cardiologist remarked that the difference between the cardiac monitor they gave me to wear for 24 spans and the ones I built were so different they looked like two different people, one who had died several times throughout the day and me.
One beauty of my software was that time didn’t pass in app while I was dead, so an early version of fitnesstracker would report that I had travelled at the speed of infinity for part of my runs. “Fitnesstracker - now with the power of wrinkles in space and time” didn’t seem like a very tenable product slogan. Since hardware integrations didn’t really seem like the field for me, I abandoned that version and mostly like to pretend those years never happened. After all, there is no healthier defense mechanism than pretending that bad things never happened…
(Note from the non existent editor - there are many. If low quality was a jet, this place would be O’Hare.)
But as the years kept ticking by and I kept using fitnesstracker, I kept refining it and refining it. And now, we’re just a few weeks from launch. Looking back though, I see so much of the dangerously sad person in the months after the cardiac ward. My absolute aversion to any kind of tracking or advertising started three weeks after I got out of the hospital. I had spent so much time researching how to get more fit that google ads turned into an enemy. Every website I went into had multiple ads on it that in my terribly depressed mind read, “Hey fat ass, you almost left your kid without a dad because you’re lazy and stupid.”
I believe that creators should be paid so I don’t use ad blockers. But that is the one time in my life that I have broken that rule and installed ad blockers everywhere.
There’s a weird thing that you only get to glimpse the weirdness of once you’ve had a heart problem. Whoever coined the phrase ‘broken heart’ for that awful feeling when love ends must have had a heart problem at some point in their life. The feeling is identical and is so nonsensical that it’s worth repressing. Everything went well, you survived…but you feel heartbroken and like you’ve fallen out of love with yourself. And you shouldn’t because you got off lucky.
Most of fitnesstracker is built for that sad person. But as I have kept using it while I have recovered and gotten into good shape, it has morphed into something that also celebrates achievements. It’s a mindfulness engine with a self congratulatory module.
And that morphed into the philosophy that became 78 solutions. It’s honestly not a productivity hack, it’s a mindset based around finding things to celebrate. And you know, nobody has ever really published around the idea of congratulating people for their achievements so it’s kind of morphed into a publication.
Speaking of which, the Sturgeon General says ‘glub glub glub’. But if it wasn’t a big fish it would say that one way to improve your fitness would be to write for 78solutions’ inaugural edition. Tentatively themed ‘out of the muck’ edition 1 will be an ongoing collection of stories about people who turned really bad things into good through hard work, a strong DIY ethic and a very high ratio of f-words per minute. Since 78solutions only pays in exposure you should familiarize yourself with symptoms of hypothermia. They include feeling warm and fuzzy, an extreme lack of energy and a lack of motivation – all of those are also symptoms that you’re an indie publisher.
Embrace the suck. Publish.
(Note from the non existent editor - just think, you could edit such ineffective marketing messages as ’embrace the suck. publish.’ Glamour, excitement, fulfillment, editors of Greg’s crave not such things.)