Dear friends,
Becky and I celebrated Becky’s birthday recently by exploring the beautiful Stara Planina (also known as the Balkan Mountains).
We climbed the 4th highest peak of Bulgaria, camped underneath the stars, and made many friends.
I brought my camcorder again, but instead of a video edit I decided to turn the footage into 20 juicy GIFs. I hope you’ll enjoy them! 🙂
4-days of mountain hiking in 20 GIFs 🔗
Next to that blog post I also wanted to share a few life-statistics, as some sort of half-year overview.
- Alcohol consumption [+32%]
- Hours of sport activity [+27%]
- Reading books [-4%]
Alcohol consumption
The graph below shows my alcohol consumption of ‘23 vs ‘24 (standard drinks per month). As you can see… I’ve been drinking considerable more than ‘23, even though I was planning to drink less 🫣
Important: a standard drink is a measure for alcohol consumption. E.g. one pint of beer (5% alcohol) = 1,97 standard drinks, a glass of wine = 2,37 standard drinks. Just so you know I didn’t drink 140 pints in June ‘23 😅
For those who think – based on this graph – that I’ve skipped Lent this year: you are mistaken. Easter just happened to be at the end of March this year and I decided to travel back to the Netherlands to celebrate Prilpop – a legendary local festival in my hometown – which is the sole reason for the 52 standard drinks that I consumed in March.
Hours of sport activity
I’ve logged 190 hours of activity on Strava as of today, which is already 7 hours more than I logged over the entire year of 2023 (183 hours in total, 149 hours by July ‘23).
The biggest contributor this year has been July, a month in which I did one full week of mountaineering in France and one week of hiking in Bulgaria. Both activities are very time intensive, which resulted in the 57 hours in July.
I’m mostly proud that I managed to stay quite consistent in my efforts this year. In 2023 I had a significant drop after March, when I got my ankle injury in the Italian Alps. In 2024 however, I trained in a more relaxed and versatile fashion, which helped me to stay injury free for longer.
Bonus fact: I’ve already ran more kilometers (687KM) than I did in the entirety of 2023 (596KM)! I might finally be able to reach 1000KM/year (a goal I had set already in back 2022 😅)
Reading books
By the end of July ‘24 I finished reading 24 books, which is one less than I did by the end of July ‘23 (25).
What is interesting however, is that the graphs for both years seem to follow an extremely similar pattern. Starting the year strong in Jan & Feb, small dip in March, trying to compensate in April, completely falling of the bandwagon in May and then overcompensating in June again. I’m not entirely sure what is up with that. I will have to do more research into that.