You fat fucking bastard.
Working from home seems great. No commute, no listening to other people's music, no trousers - it's a dream come true, right? Well, nearly. You see, if you start working from home and you're already a fat bastard you will rapidly become a seriously unfit fat bastard. After eight months of leaving the house two or three times a week (at most!) I've discovered that while I used to be able to get to the train station in five minutes, now it takes me nearly 10, and I want to die once I get there. A couple of flights of stairs and I'm huffing and puffing like a fucking steam train. I don't mind being dangerously overweight, but this is inconveniencing me, so it's time to do something about it.
I could go running, but that would involve ~150KG of my fat body smashing down on my knees and would probably cripple me for life. So I've bought a cheap exercise bike instead and I've decided to apply some trendy gamification shite to encourage me to actually use the fucking thing.
Score Graph
The Rules
I wanted to calculate a simple numerical score value from each day's exercise, but I had to be careful to try and avoid any perverse incentives. The first thing was to establish what my actual goal is.
The Goal
The goal is not strictly to lose weight. While it's true that I'm massively overweight, that's not anything new. The goal is to improve my level of fitness. The best way to do this is to exercise with the goal of keeping my heart-rate above a certain level (I've arbitrarily picked 100bpm to start with, but I'm flexible for adjusting it as I go) for as long as I can.
The Minimum Time
Over time my fitness should improve, and the system should account for this. The way I've decided to do this is to set a minimum length of time for exercising with my heart rate above the target level. If any given exercise session is under the current minimum length, then it will score zero. As I improve and exercise for longer, the system will suggest that I increase my minimum length. There's also an incentive in the scoring system to increase it when I'm able.
The Score
The score is calculated from two elements: the distanced travelled in metres and the minimum time in minutes. By rewarding for longer distances travelled the score should encourage going beyond the bare minimum to meet the minimum time length; and by using the minimum time length (and not the actual time for that session) it provides an incentive to increase the minimum time. This means that the minimum time should continue to be a non-trivial but achievable goal as my fitness improves.