Playing for Health: The Games & Impact Cycling Team is blogging, and racing, their way to better health and wellness. The team’s first race, the 2014 El Tour de Tucson is 5 days away and you will be able to track their progress on social media on the CGI Facebook and Twitter pages. Check out the team’s introductory post here.
We live in a data obsessed culture. At any given moment you can check your credit score, find out if your child has turned in an assignment, log the nutritional profile of your lunch, see a report of your sleep quality, and check the stock market all from your nearest web browser or smart phone.
But, what do you do with the overload of information? It is easy to get lost in the data, wading through a jungle of numbers without a real sense of what they represent. Data can be more than a quick temperature read, more than something that seems positive or negative without a sense of long term implications. Used as component of your personal tool kit, data can be a very powerful tool on the road to making a change.
Data from the last Games & Impact Team training ride before our race. This is an example of how the Runkeeper app presents the workout map, elevation, and speed information.
What types of goals can benefit from data collection? All of them! Of course, health and fitness related goals are some of the first to come to mind. Fitness tracking devices and apps are becoming standard on newer phones, and some companies are offering them to employees to encourage healthy behaviors. With any change you have in mind, there your starting point and your desired result. The progress between the two can be planned, realized, and measured.
Let’s break it down:
The Goal
Creating your goal is perhaps one of the most important steps to success.The key to a good goal is determining what success looks like for you. Perhaps you want to reduce stress. Great! So what does that look like? Maybe that means you want to spend 5 minutes breathing deeply each evening, or take a yoga class, or spend one evening a week with friends. Thinking about a fitness goal? Frame your fitness goals in terms of what you would like to be able to do, in my case, I want to be able to cycle 55 miles in a day.
The Plan
Successful projects start with a plan. Think of your plan as an iea of the steps needed to get from A to B and resources you need to accomplish each step. It is helpful to assign the steps to a timeline or schedule to help you keep track (collect data) on your progress. It is also helpful to be flexible with yourself as you go along. When I jumped back on my bicycle for the first time in a year just a few months ago, I was riding 7-10 miles at a time. I knew that in order to accomplish 55 miles, I would have to add a few miles to the total each week. I threw in a few rounds of hilly rides to build strength, and I had a fairly simple, reasonable training plan.
Do It!
This is the part where you have to dive in with both feet. It is easy to become trapped in “paralysis by analysis”, meaning you spend more time planning, mulling, and tweaking the plan, that you never getting around to the doing and the learning by trial. You will never really get any data to improve the plan until you test, so once you have a reasonable draft of your plan, move forward and try it! You may discover right away that there are pieces of the plan that need to be revised, the point is to that getting started will help you build forward momentum.
You will want to use some method of tracking to help you gather data about your progress. This can be a fitness tracker that you wear, a website that lets you log activities, or simply a spreadsheet that you create. We will talk more about some of the methods we are using later and you can see an example of the Runkeeper app in this post (pictured above, left). Right now though, the form is less important than the function, whatever you choose should be something you will use consistently.
Tweak and Improve
Once you begin tracking your progress, it is time to review where you are at in terms of your longer term goals. If you are meeting the progress points on your timeline, take a moment to celebrate your early successes! If you find yourself off schedule or just not making progress, take a bit of time to review the data you have collected and have an honest assessment of why you are off track. Are there factors that are interfering with your ability to consistently follow your plan? It might be that it will simply take longer to achieve your goal, in which case adjusting your timeline might be the right move.
Congratulations, you just used data to inform your plan design! Most plans will yield better results when tweaked and adjusted over time, don’t be afraid to experiment, but if you are making steady progress, don’t be afraid to stay the course.
Tracking data has been an important part of training for the Tour de Tucson with the Games & Impact Cycling Team, what data can you track to help achieve your goals?
From building an activity habit to starting a cycling team
Aside, have you played Zombies, Run!? It is a great way to bring more zombie apocalyptic fun into your day in 30 minute to one-hour chunks.
This year CGI Innovation Lab team spent some time running. Well, for some of us (ahem, me) “jogging” is probably a better way to describe it… It all started with someone’s crazy idea that we should run together in the Warrior Dash in April 2014. A few months later, we found ourselves playing the mobile running game, Zombies, Run!, while working on a Public Health Impact Guide themed “Building an Activity Habit.” (What are Impact Guides? Learn more about them here.) The guide for Zombies, Run! prompts players to use the mobile game to build a regular walking or running activity habit and think about how a game-infused tool can support the success of this habit in a new or different way.
So, one of the outcomes of working on this guide and playing this game together is that it led our team at work to talk about other activities we enjoy and how we use game-infused tools to support achieving our activity goals.
Fast forward a few months and the (not-so-)crazy idea to ride in El Tour de Tucson’s 55 mile race distance and a little racing has turned into a bigger thing – the launch of the Games & Impact Cycling Team.
Going from an idea, to a race, to a team
Founding members of the Games & Impact Cycling Team from left: Adam Ingram-Goble, Kathryn Dutchin, Juli James and Sean James (not pictured)
Maybe it’s not totally news that games for health and wellness is growing and we are seeing seeing changes and learning what works at the industry and individual levels. The developing goal of our team is to work together to look at how these game-infused tools are helping our society to rock positive changes in our daily lives (to start). Do you use interfaces to track your activities across devices? What’s worked for you? And, do you share your goals in a group or work on things individually? We each use, or have at least tried, many of the the myriad of health and activity trackers out there from wearables** like the Jawbone Up24, Nike’s Fuel Band, or the Fitbit One. We also have played with smartphone and GPS tools like myfitnesspal (for diet data), Runkeeper, and Breeze (running, cycling, and walking), and each of us has brought a new flavor of activity (in addition to running and cycling, things like kettlebells or aerial fitness) to the table since we began “talking fitness” together throughout this year.
After running from zombies with co-workers, to jumping into that Warrior Dash together, and now forming the cycling team we are really looking at how ubiquitous interfaces are changing the knowledge and empowerment we can have over our own wellness picture, including important factors like rest, diet and activity. This is just to tease the early thought process that led us to forming the team. We’ll explore these ideas a bit more in posts as we continue training.
How we’re participating in El Tour
So, we began talking about how we can achieve our individual goals as a team, both challenging and supporting each other throughout the process. We will post more as we progress in our training but for now we wanted to introduce the team and share that we also like the idea that our own health goals can have a larger impact on this world. To that end, we are also participating in fundraising to support this year’s El Tour de Tucson primary beneficiary, Special Olympics.
You can follow along our training and even jump into the conversation with us on social media at our Facebook page or on Twitter with the hashtags #cgicycling and #eltourdetucson. Please donate to our team’s efforts and support Special Olympics.
And, check it out, from our most recent training ride:
#cgicycling Training ride approaches 40 miles!
About Special Olympics and our fundraising meter
The mission of Special Olympics is to provide year-round sports training and athletic competition in a variety of Olympic-type sports for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, giving them continuing opportunities to develop physical fitness, demonstrate courage, experience joy and participate in a sharing of gifts, skills and friendship with their families, other Special Olympics athletes and the community. – via El Tour de Tucson
**The mention of any activity tracker or device does not imply endorsement by the Center for Games & Impact. Additionally, we were not solicited by any company mentioned to evaluate any device or app, and neither the Center, nor its employees, received any compensation for doing so.