One of my resolutions this year was to work out more. As a Googler I’m inclined to be data-driven, so I decided to track my exercise throughout the year. I made a Google Calendar and every time I went rock climbing, worked out at the gym, hiked, or went to karate back at MIT, I added an event. I slapped together a little Python program using the Calendar APIs to summarize my exercise so far. I’m not yet reaching my goals of working out six days a week, but March has been a big improvement over February, which was an improvement over January (and I spent much of January traveling).
And with yesterday’s announcement of Google App Engine (as well as support for App Engine’s URL fetcher in the GData client posted this morning), I ported my script from a command-line client to a webapp: dave glasser’s exercises. Follow along and make fun of me if I don’t go to the gym enough!
(One little detail is that I’ve written workout-specific description parsers: Gym
parses out the length or number of repetitions of various exercises (some of which have multiple phrasings), and Rock Climbing
figures out if I’ve gone bouldering or top-roping.)
Future plans:
- actual HTML output
- filtering and statistics based on dates
- make the special parsing be based on data, not hardcoded
- let other people use the tool to view their own exercise calendars
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