Challenging myself in 2023

In the last 3 months of 2021 I found myself being rather physically inactive, so I embarked on a walking challenge in 2022: I had to do a distinct walk on each day and average 5km across the 365 walks during the year. The challenge was eventually achieved, and raised a bit of money for charity. You can see some details here:-

https://www.justgiving.com/page/alan-pickering-1667128827673

https://twitter.com/ad_pickering/status/1609581379750350850 

Via the above links one can access the rather obsessive spreadsheet I kept, detailing each walk. I love a histogram almost as much as a spreadsheet, so here's the one for the distances achieved on the 365  walks in 2022:-




After 2022, however, I got the bug for annual challenges and so I've set myself a combined reading and fishing challenge for 2023. I felt these two hobbies of mine had become a bit neglected in recent years.  The challenge is to catch 25 different species of freshwater fish in England and France, and a total of 365 fish in total. (I decided I would allow hybrids, which aren't really distinct species, but are quite common.) 25 species seemed reasonably demanding as I had caught this number of different freshwater species in the past 6 years of angling. I restricted the challenge to England and France so I couldn't just go on a fishing trip somewhere exotic and log some new species. 

Of course, on a single successful fishing trip I might sometimes catch half a dozen different species. The need to put some limit on this offered me a "natural" way to get the reading part in to the challenge. So, in order to qualify to be able to catch a single species, I made a rule that I would have to have read a new book before the next fishing trip. So, that would require me to read at least 25 new books in 2023, or roughly one a fortnight. If I happened to catch multiple species on the fishing trip after finishing a book, then only 1 of the species caught could count towards the challenge.

I decided to reactivate this old blog (set up in 2012 but never used) to write about the 2023 challenge as it progresses. I have an inkling that there will be some statistical reflections alongside the entries about the books and fishing trips, because several of the books I am planning to read will naturally segue into statistics and data analysis. Linking most of the books to statistics will create another challenge. I hope that some of the blog will interest some people some of the time.




Comments

  1. Professor Quincunx24 January 2023 at 14:57

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  2. Professor Quincunx27 March 2023 at 23:05

    I am going on a trip to South Korea and Japan tomorrow for a month. If I can't fish while away for a whole month, that makes the fishing part of the challenge more tricky. I am therefore contemplating allowing one fishing species to be caught on this trip. After all, the rules are arbitrary and I created them, so I can change them :-)

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