I’ve been obsessively tracking data about myself since 2009. The most visible data I track is on Daytum which includes Miles Run (by location), Books Read (by type), Airplane Flights (by carrier), and Nights In Town (by city). I also track all of my running data (most recently on RunKeeper and SmashRun) and all of my health data (including what I eat) on Fitbit. I track plenty of other stuff, but those are the public / systematic things.

I started doing this in 2009 – see My 2009 By The Numbers for how I was thinking about things then. This year I’m thinking about things more categorically, based on a set of activities I do that drive what I spend my time on. Here’s where the year ended up.

Running: I had a great running year – probably the best in a long time. I ran six marathons, including four in eight weeks, and the last one of the year was the fastest since 2003 in 4:28:46. Overall, I covered 1,125.91 miles (not including the 6.5 miles I’m going to run today). 339 were in Boulder; next best was a monster month in Tuscany of 156.97 miles. I crossed 100 in Keystone and had another strong month in Paris at 94.65 miles. You can tell that I had two weeks of vacation in Tucson this year, plenty of short runs in cities I traveled to for work (SF, NY, Seattle), and then a bunch of marathons.

Weight: I started the year at 208, hit a high point of 219.4 at the end of October, and weighed in at 202.8 this morning. My goal is to be 190 on 12/31/12.

Sleep: I clearly missed a few days since I only have 354 days reported for this year. I often get asked how often I travel vs. sleep at home. Eldorado Springs is where I call home so I was there 99 nights. Boulder, which is a condo I have down the block from my office logged 40 nights. So – for the year, I was in Boulder for 139 of 354 nights, or 39% of the time. Keystone was very light this year – we were only there 25 nights (and 14 of them were the past two weeks). You can see my month in Tuscany in August and month in Paris in July, two weeks of vacation plus a little in Tucson (I guess I like Tucson), 16 nights in New York, 10 nights in San Francisco, and 10 nights in Seattle. I was only in Boston five nights this year – that will change in 2012 as I’m spending the second half of January there. While I swore off red eyes several years ago, I still ended up doing three of them this year. And if you are curious about the other 16 places, they are Los Angeles, Newport, San Antonio, Napa, Boise, Ann Arbor, Bismarck, San Diego, Orlando, Kansas City, New Orleans, Washington DC, Montreal, Portland, and Colorado Springs.

Reading: I didn’t read that much this year – only 41 books. In contrast in 2010 I read 52 books and in 2009 I read 78. Business, Biography, and Mental Floss were all even at 7 and then Philosophy, Fiction, and Sports at 4 each. I’ll definitely read more in 2012 and as you’ve probably noticed I’ll continuing blogging my reviews.

As a special bonus, I’m about to cross 6,000,000 steps logged on my Fitbit. That’ll happen today on my run. I wonder if I’ll get a badge for that.

When I reflect on 2011, I had a great year on many fronts, both personal and professional. I’m looking forward to 2012 and am doubling down on my personal commitment to myself to focus on things that matter and ignore the noise.

Today is my 46th birthday. I’m hanging out with a bunch of friends and family, enjoying their company, and reflecting on the past year. 45 was a good, but intense year. Lots of ups, a few downs, and much learned. Following are some of the things I’m chewing on as I start being 46.

Mortality: I’ve had a lot of reminders of mortality lately. In the past year, several close friends’ parents have died and a few other friends have gotten very ill. When I think about being 46, I accept that even in the best case scenario I’m probably half way done with my time on this planet. I’m happy with my physical self – I’m probably in the best shape I’ve been in since I was in my early 20′s – but I’ve finally decided to really focus on dropping the 20 pounds I want to get rid of. Rather than being 210, I’d like to spend the rest of my life around 190.

Optimism: I’m an optimistic person – always have been. I’ve noticed an incredible amount of negativity around the system in the past year. Historically I’ve tuned out most of it because I ignore all non-tech news, but I’ve really noticed it in the tech news the past year. Clearly a switch flipped and the journalist / bloggers decided the best way to get attention – or at least links – was to be negative. Balanced is fine (not all is good), but the preponderance of negative trending toward nasty and hostile, especially without any facts or substance behind it, is a drag. I haven’t decided what to do about this yet, but I think I’ll likely just keep tuning it out the best I can.

Learning: I had another awesome year on this front. Between the companies and entrepreneurs I get to work with, TechStars, the books I’ve written, my running, and all the random stuff that I talk about and explore with Amy, I’ve learned more than I could have hoped for. I especially loved the experience of living in a new city for a month (Paris) – just living – not trying to be a tourist, or alter my normal work rhythm, but live in a totally different place for 30 days. Amy and I are going to do this in New York from mid-April to mid-May in 2012 as part of our “live for a month in a different city every year” experience.

No Assholes: I’ve worked really hard to get to a place where I get to spend almost all of my time with people who I want to spend time with. I’ve been able to do this while figuring out how to engage with lots of new, interesting people all the time. I’m going to work even harder at this at 46 – more great people, no assholes.

Travel: My greatest personal disappointment while I was 45 is that I sucked at managing my travel – again. At several points throughout the year I was completely exhausted from the endless cross-country travel. I’m taking a totally different approach at 46 – I’ve already locked down my entire schedule for 2012. With the exceptions of emergencies, I’m not making any trips that aren’t already scheduled. There will be a lot more video conferencing in 2012 and longer stays in cities when I do travel. Who knows if that tempo will work better, but I’m going to try.

For all of you who are part of my life directly, who know me through this blog, or have a relationship with me in any way, thanks for being part of my first 45 years. I look forward to spending time with you during the next 45.

To everyone who lost someone close to them on 9/11 – I’m sending you every bit of good karma that I can today. While I was in New York that day, I was lucky and didn’t lose anyone close, but I’ll always remember 9/11 and I think about it every time I’m in New York.

I’ve always had some survivor guilt around 9/11. I had a lot of emotional trauma from it, but everything ended up fine. My survivor guilt is amplified by my own anxieties around the events that lingered for about three months. I’ve never felt these anxieties were warranted on my part, but they were there and I couldn’t deny them.

While I’ve told my story to plenty of friends, maybe by writing it down and getting it out there on this tenth anniversary I’ll both contribute to the memory of loved ones on 9/11 as well as help me (and maybe others) get some closure. There’s a part of this that feels self-indulgent since I wasn’t directly impacted, but there’s another part of me that knows I’m searching for closure on this. So, here’s the story.

I took a red eye from San Francisco to New York on Monday night 9/10. It was something that I was regularly doing at this time as I tried to manage my way through the collapse of the Internet bubble. I landed at LGA at 6am, took a car to The Benjamin hotel where I was staying for the first time (I randomized my hotels back then just to experience different ones), turned off my cell phone and went to sleep. I didn’t have a meeting until 10 so I set the alarm clock in the room for 9:00. I woke up in the normal haze of jet lag to someone on the radio shouting about something going on at the World Trade Center. At first, I thought it was some sort of drive time radio talk show joke, but as I gradually woke up I started processing that something major was happening. I turned on the TV – something I rarely do in hotels – and saw the first tower on fire and the chaos that erupted as a plane crashed in to the second tower. I don’t remember seeing the plane crash, but I do remember seeing the endless plumes of black smoke.

By the time I was mentally functional, it was about 9:10. I turned on my phone to call Amy who I knew was on the road on the way to DIA to catch a flight to New York. Her birthday is 9/14 – she was going to meet me in New York, we were going to hang out for a few days, and then go to Paris for a week of vacation together. I had trouble getting through on my cell phone but somehow managed to get her on the phone around 10:00. She was bawling hysterically – she’d pulled over to the side of the road and was frantically trying to reach me. Since my phone was off, she couldn’t, and her brain had immediately gone to the place that so many peoples did which was “my loved one is on the plane.”

While we were talking, the first tower collapsed. I remember watching it on TV and being unable to continue talking on the phone. Amy asked me what was wrong and I simply couldn’t answer. It was inconceivable to me that the World Trade Center would disappear and – having been in the building a number of times, immediately starting trying to calculate how many people must have been inside.

I finally pulled it together, told Amy to go back home, and we’d figure out what to do once things settled down. I turned on my computer, plugged in the hotel ethernet cable, and connected to the Internet. Amazingly it worked flawlessly even though by this point I couldn’t make a phone call on my cell or the hotel phone. At the time I was using both AOL and Yahoo IM – a bunch of messages popped up from people who knew I was traveling to New York checking to see if I was ok. Email flowed fast and furiously for a little while and as I surfed the net and watched TV from my hotel room in midtown, I got more and more freaked out.

By about 11am I was completely paralyzed. I didn’t really know what to do. By this point both buildings had fallen, four planes had crashed, and there was total chaos on TV as no one had any idea what was really going on. I remember looking out of the hotel window at the beautiful day outside but being afraid to leave my room. All kinds of doomsday thoughts crossed my mind, like “go get a few gallons of bottled water” but I sat, transfixed to the TV, email, and IM hoping someone would say what was happening. I felt safe in my room, but also terrified that I was in the middle of Manhattan – isolated in the middle of one of the largest cities on the planet.

Early in the afternoon I found out via email that my friend Paul Berberian, who was the CEO of Raindance (I was on the board) was in town with Nick Cuccaro, his CFO. Raindance was a public company and they were talking to investors downtown. They were safe and trying to figure out how to get home. We connected by email and decided to meet at my hotel. By this point all the flights were grounded and as I tried to figure out how to get a rental car, it quickly became clear that it would be – at best – really hard to do.

I wrote an email to Jenny Lawton, a close friend who was working with me at Interliant and lived in Greenwich. Jenny offered up her car if we wanted it. By this point it was early afternoon and the news reporting was now in a cycle of redundancy – lots of speculation but no new information. While I was still scared to leave my hotel room, I had this incredible urge to get back to Boulder.

When Paul and Nick showed up, we agreed to go to Jenny’s, get her car, and drive home. Around 5pm we made our way down Park Avenue toward Grand Central Station. There were no cars out, very few people, and an eerie hush had fallen over downtown. The picture in my mind is that it was already twilight and a chill was in the air. I was anxious but when we got to Grand Central it was empty. We figured out which train was going to Greenwich and got on without a ticket. Thirty or so minutes later we got out and jumped into Jenny’s car.

Jenny made us spaghetti for dinner – I can still remember sitting at her dining room table eating the first proper meal of the day. Jenny gave us the keys to her orange SUV (I think it was an Isuzu, but I do remember it was orange) and off we went. The roads were empty and before we knew it we were cruising through Pennsylvania.

All three of us had an overwhelming desire to get home. We each had cell phones and had touched base a few times so our families knew where we were, but none of us had a car charger for a phone so we were protecting our batteries. We stopped at a gas station to fill up on road food – I stayed in the car but to Paul to grab me some fruit stuff. A gobbled down a bag of it before I realized it was “fruit flavor sugar candy” at which point I had to rid out a hard sugar crash in the back seat of the car as Paul and Nick drove through the night.

I remember a lot of very specific things from the trip. We stopped somewhere for breakfast in Iowa at an I-80 roadside restaurant and had an awesome breakfast. There was no useful information on the radio – we just listened to the same speculation over and over again – clearly, no one had any idea what was going on. The sky was a perfect shade of blue. There were no airplanes in the sky and no contrails, which was especially startling in the context of the blue sky. Nebraska is a wide state – we ended up deciding there was an East Nebraska and a West Nebraska. Three guys in a car for 24 hours after a very anxious previous 12 hours makes for a very smelly car. Our capacity for being thankful that we were alive was endless.

As we got entered Colorado we were out of cell phone juice. Nick was obsessed with going by DIA and getting his car, so we ended up adding two hours to our trip at the end. When I finally got home it was dark, but Amy was waiting at the door. We had a very emotional moment, at which point I went and took a shower and then collapsed for a long time.

I didn’t travel again until December. It was the longest stretch of time since college that I’ve been in one place. Some was travel anxiety, some was re-evaluation of the tempo of my life, and some was just plain acceptance of the exhaustion that had been building over the past few years with the corresponding capitulation from a very emotional moment.

As I write these words, it’s incredible to me that this was 10 years ago. The sheer number of specific memories I have amazes me. The emotional feeling around the event continues to be overwhelming to me. While our capacity as humans to deal with, survive, and move on is powerful, this reminds me that there are many things we never forget.

To anyone who lost a loved one on 9/11 – my heart goes out to you. I know how hard this was for me, and as you can see from my story, I was simply a visitor in the city for a brief time in which this heinous event occurred. I’m thinking of you today, and sending you my love.

Every now and then my mom sends me a pile of old photos of me and my brother Daniel. Here’s one.

Notice all of the cameras. I’ve got two (I’m the shaggy haired guy on the right) and Daniel has one (he’s the short shaggy haired guy on the left.) I have no idea how old I was but I’m going to guess around 11 based on my white knee socks and light blue short shorts. I’m 99% sure the cameras are a Contax (the smaller brown one) and a Pentax. Oh – and check out that cool camera strap.

My mom is a great photographer and when we were kids we hung out in the dark room a lot. I remember how cool I thought the red light was, how bizarre the chemicals smelled, and how our washing machine and dryer made perfect tables for the printing process. Developer, stop bath, and fixer – remember that?

I stopped taking pictures when I went to college, but I can’t remember why. Maybe in the next phase of life I’ll rediscover this, possibly with a Lytro camera. I can only imagine how cool it would be to combine that with Occipital.

Amy and I have been married for 18 years. On the summer solstice in 1993 we went to the top of Ester Dome in Fairbanks, Alaska and exchanged vows. Earlier that day we went to Pay ‘n Save and bought our wedding rings (I think we got six for $1.99). I wrote the word “vows” on a piece of paper twice, tore it in half, and gave one of the vows to Amy to give to me when we got to the top. We never had a formal wedding because we never wanted one, although we did visit the Boulder County Courthouse on June 21, 1996, paid our $20, assured them that we weren’t brother and sister, and made it official. But we count years from that date on top of Ester Dome in 1993.

I can’t image having a better life partner. Like all couples, we’ve had our ups and downs, although the only real downs that I remember are the ones that catalyzed me into action to change my behavior. The list of amazing things Amy has brought into my life is extraordinarily long, but the greatest is the joy that I get from spending time with her, learning from her, and just being myself around her.

The journey through life on this planet is a complicated one. Many years ago I decided that I had no idea when the lights were going to go out so I was determined to live every single moment as fully as I could. As I get older, I want to spend more and more of these moments with Amy. We’re going to be together every day for the rest of this summer – and I’m ecstatic!

Amy – you are the most awesome person I’ve known. Thanks for choosing me.

I’ve been quiet since the weekend.  It’s not because I’ve had nothing to say (that would be a first), but because I was absolutely slaughtered by the flu.  I spent all of Sunday and Monday in bed.  I managed to work yesterday and stay on top of the things flying around and today was more or less normal (with a long afternoon nap).  But that was easily the worst kick in the ass I’ve had from a cold in many years.

I’d put together a string of three weeks of six days of running a week prior to getting sick so there’s some chance that I was a little fatigued from that, but I generally felt great after my week off the grid for my 45th birthday.  I’ve gone pretty hardcore on food / diet as a result of reading Younger Next Year so my body might have been a little confused by that.  Or maybe I just shouldn’t have spent so much time next to my partner Ryan after he was recovering from the flu.

Regardless of what it was, I don’t wish that one on any of you.  Maybe this is the year to get a flu shot if you haven’t already.

I had a new experience today.  At 7am I had my first MRI at the Boulder Community Hospital.  I was a little nervous, although I’m not entirely sure why.  I was in and out in 45 minutes – it was fascinating.

I hurt my lower back about five months ago (actually, exactly on March 13th at about 1pm at my parents house in Dallas).  I went for a two hour run and then took my dad to Fry’s for his birthday to buy him a new color printer.  As I unloaded the printer from the car, I lifted correctly, but then twisted left and immediately knew I’d screwed myself.  I rested a week and started running again in advance of a marathon in mid-April in St. Louis.  I had a great three hour run in Charlotte the first week of April and thought I was ready to roll.  Amy and I drove to Santa Fe the following weekend; when I got out of the car when we got back to Boulder I had enormous lower back pain.  I got a massage the next day (big mistake) and when I woke up Tuesday morning in a hotel room in Seattle I couldn’t get up off the toilet, nor could I completely straighten up.  Four weeks of rest and three months of intermittent running with regular recurrence of back pain in the same spot after a few days caused me to finally decide that I’m hurt and need to figure out what’s going on.

Boulder is fortunate that it has a great community hospital system.  There are plenty of new facilities and the people are very nice.  I checked in and got my paperwork.  It was already completed via my doctor’s referral.  The charge for the MRI was $3,696, my insurance plan allowed $1,078, and there was $0 co-pay or money owed by me.  I was completely stunned by this – I expected to at least have to pay a $20 co-pay.  The entire billing / checkin thing took about as long as it takes to checkin on FourSquare.  I pondered where the difference between the $3,696 and the $1,078 was coming from, or whether it simply vanished into the ether.

I went to the Imaging Center with my Dark Side of the Moon CD, ready to chill out in a tube.  I changed into hospital scrubs and was escorted to the MRI machine by a lovely nurse who talked me through everything.  The machine I was in didn’t have a CD (it had an MP3 player) but my head was in a cradle that wouldn’t fit the earphones so I punted on the music.  I got a little “panic thing” to squeeze if I freaked out and then went into the tube.

I basically had a noisy 20 minute shivasana.  They did six scans, most between three and five minutes.  The noise was loud, but rhythmic.  I had earplugs so it was more like a weird electronica thing.  I did my share of isolation tanks in college (I went through an isolation tank phase) – this was much shorter, much more comfortable, but much noisier.  As is my practice with shivasana, I dozed off near the end.

They pulled me out, I walked down the hall, and picked up a CD with my scan on it.  The software is pretty ancient, doesn’t run on my Mac, but worked fine on a PC.  I have no idea what I’m looking at – well – other than my lower back and pelvis region with all the ensuing pieces – but it’s pretty amazing to look at and ponder.

It’s fun to be a human, even when you are hurt.

In addition to missing the sun up here in Homer today, I miss my dogs.

I guess I need to get them on a Skype call later today, kind of like what Todd Vernon did with me earlier today.

Help me get my photo of Amy’s Burning Mercedes up on Fail Blog.  All you have to do is click through on the picture below and vote for it. 

moar funny pictures

And yes – that really is Amy’s old Mercedes on fire in our driveway.  Oops.

Last year I did an obsessive experiment.  Every morning, as one of the tabs in my browser (then Firefox, now Chrome) during my daily information routine, I opened up a clever application called Daytum.  In it, I tracked four things: the number of miles I ran, the number of books I read, the number of segments I flew on which airline, and where I slept.  Following is the summary and some commentary.

I had a disappointing running year.  I usually cover over 1,000 miles / year.  I lost about four months this year to either injuries (silly ones) or a cold (I had a multi-month bacterial infection that took a while to figure out and nail.)  Also, I didn’t run any marathons which, while a bummer, was something I expected would happen sometime on my question for 50 marathons by the time I’m 50 years old.  So – 2009 will be known henceforth as “the lost year for Feld Running.”  My goal in 2010 is six marathons and 1500 miles.  And I’ll be tracking it obsessively with other software.

I typically read one or two books a week so 78 seems about the amount for a typical year.  I always find the categories interesting – I read less SciFi this year than normal (I’d expect it to be on par with Mental Floss).  The business books read are higher because I’m getting so many in the mail as “pre-release” or “review” copies so I’m trying to at least read some of them.  No different goals for 2010 – just “read what’s in front of me that looks interesting from my infinite pile of books.”

Airplane travel in 2009 was totally fubared.  I eventually decided to try to stop flying United and shift as much travel as I could to Southwest.  I expect the ratios to be very different in 2010.  I also took way too many short trips in 2009 and have decided to completely change my travel rhythm in 2010.  Specifically, I’m only going to travel every other week – my goal in 2010 is to spend every other week in Boulder.  Now, I know there will be exceptions, but I’ve already scheduled out my weeks in Boulder for the year so all I have to do now is be disciplined about scheduling.

I was fascinated to see the distribution of “where I slept in 2009.”  I expected Eldorado Springs (my main house) to be at the top, but I also expected Keystone (my mountain house) to be ahead of Boulder (my city condo).  The business travel is as expected – San Francisco, Boston, New York, Seattle, and LA.  Vacations and weeks off the grid were San Diego (tennis), Mexico and Nassau (beach), and Santa Fe.  The balance are short trips for specific things.  The one think that I will not do in 2010 is “30,000 Feet” – I’m completely done with redeyes.  And – no Alaska in 2009 – I expect I’ll spend 31 days there in 2010.

In 2010, I’m going to track an entirely different set of data – namely, all of my health and fitness data as part of my exploration around the idea of “human instrumentation.”  I’m currently using a Zeo, Withings Scale, BodyMedia BodyBug, a Fitbit, and a Garmin 305.  Look for more on this soon.  And – if you make a device that tracks anything about the human being, drop me a line – I’m interested in talking to you.