Au,gu,st 2018 Financial Update

Hi RIP voyeurs,

Welcome to my regular monthly update. The summer is almost over in Switz…

“RIP, are you a millionaire or not?”

😐

Hey, take your time to read the post and you’ll discover pretty soon 🙂

“RIP? Can we get to the point?”

Give up 😐 No way 😐 I’m practicing my poker face 😐 Leave off 😐 😐 🙂 😀 😆 😐

See? told you!

“RIP… you made a typo in the post title… maybe you mistakenly pressed…”

Uh, didn’t notice. Yeah, it’s probably a mistake 😀

Anyway, August is gone, and my Paternity leave is coming to an end. Two months have been passed out of office, only two weeks left. Sadness.

Let’s look at finances and metrics.

More details can be found in my Net Worth spreadsheet (embedded here).

Metrics

Net worth: 

EUR 869.0k, +19.9k / CHF 978.6k , -4.6k / USD 1009.9k, +16.9k.

Yes, we’re finally a millionaire family (in USD)!

First checkbox checked!

I’m a Million Dollar Man! Twooooo commaaaaaaaas! 😀

Ok, moving on.

This has been a pretty good month! NW in both EUR and U,S,D (stop it! Stop!) is up by a lot. That’s due to CHF getting stronger, a slightly negative Mr. Market month and an average saving month.

Actually, mid month the market was in the red and the EUR dropped 2-3% in a couple of days, thanks to Turkish Lira devaluation. At that point NW in both CHF and USD was negative and the million target was moving farther. Then USD dropped hard during second half of the month, Mr. Market made a slight U-Turn (and dropped again a bit at the end) and USD NW crossed again the line. It’s been a rollercoaster, and probably it’s not over yet.

Income: 12.5k CHF. Again, worst month on record. Last month as an employee for Mrs RIP and no special income (bonuses, dividends, stocks…) for me. But it’s ok. It’s way more than we need 🙂

Actually, Mrs RIP salary has not been credited yet, some final calculations need to be performed. I’ve put in our private NW document my estimate for her salary. If actual salary would be different I’ll retroactively change that.

The 11 USD mentioned as dividend is actually interests on cash sitting in my Interactive Brokers account. Not bad, thanks 🙂

Expenses: 4233 CHF. Exceptional! We crossed the 4k line just at the very end of the month. And you know what? it’s been one of the best months ever in my life! My passions don’t cost a dime. That’s the key secret of frugal happiness: find a passion that doesn’t cost a fortune, ideally nothing. Running, walking, biking, swimming, reading, writing, thinking, playing with your children, cuddling with your significant other and so on. We spent just a little above 4k out of which 1k was purely discretional and avoidable if needed. Expense details will follow.

I expect September expenses to be significantly higher: 2 weeks of vacation and few extra days in Italy with a lot of gifts to make…

Savings: 8302 CHF. Very good!

Saving rate: 66.2%. Above 65% even on the worst month income-wise. Perfect!

Saving rate for 2018 so far: 73.4%. Perfect! 70% by end of year is totally attainable.

FI%: 72.42% (+1.66%). Very good.

FI Forecast Date: April 2020 (20 months left, -2 months compared to last month). I love when we walk faster than time! Next two months we’ll roll out two very good months of 2017 from the 12 months average used for forecasting, so I don’t expect this metric to go down much.

(NEW!) FI Coast Date: January 2028 (-7 months). This new metric indicates when our NW will reach 100% FI on its own, assuming a growth rate identical to our SWR (plus inflation). It means that if we earn enough to cover current living expenses (stop saving), and let our wealth snowballs for 9.5 years it will reach FI on its own. It’s a relaxing thing to know. Anyway, since we’re actually saving (and NW is growing more than SWR per year), this date is getting closer each month at a high speed (cut 4 years in this year).

When we cross FI this date will be in the past.

Current Allowance: Year 30.4k EUR (+696) – Month 2535 EUR (+58) – Day 83.33 EUR (+1.91). Crossed 30k EUR per year!

Current Withdrawal Rate: 4.83% (-0.12%). Good. Getting closer to the good old 4% 🙂

Years of Ideal expenses accumulated: 20.7 (+0.5). Every month we increase our ‘stash by ~half a year of ideal expenses. Very good.

Success Rate at Current WR, based on cFIREsim, 40 years horizon, 75%/25% split (other options default): 65.74% (+4.63%). We’re slowly buying robustness to our plan 🙂

Swiss FI%: 54.69% (+0.64%). Even though NW in CHF went down, expenses decreased making current FI number smaller. In case we decide to stay in Switzerland, this metric will explode when we change apartment or child care costs kick in…

Swiss FI Forecast Date: May 2022 (45 months left, +2 compared to last month). This year the CHF is strong (finally, after 2 years of weakness) and our NW in CHF is not growing much while real expenses are going up. That means Swiss FI forecast date is moving faster than time.

The new progress bar:

WIP: I’m traveling and my graphic capabilities are even more limited 🙂

Major Wins

Very low expenses

I still don’t know how we did manage to spend so few (~4.2k CHF) during a full month of vacation, at home. It’s enlightening: staying at home for vacation is super cheap. Cheaper than a regular working month. That may seem obvious but it’s not. We had more time to go shopping or to eat out but we didn’t. That’s a good piece of information to estimate expenses once early retired.

Details:

• Housing & Utilities: 1710 CHF. Almost standard. 1385 on Rent and Condo Fees, 114 on utilities, 100 CHF on cleaning lady (sorry Roger) and 111 on minor pieces of furniture (an Ikea visit). Fun fact: final Condo Fees bill for 07/2017 – 06/2018 arrived last week. We’re going to get back 95 CHF next month 🙂 I even investigated the details and discovered we’ve been extremely cheap eco-friendly with heating: only consumed 274 CHF for the whole year, less than 30% of what an average Italian family spends on heating. It’s not been a remarkably cold winter but I demand credits for having pushed back Mrs RIP requests for higher temperature in the apartment 😉 At the same time we’ve been unreasonably indulgent with “hot water”: 695 CHF. Too many showers? Too much perfectionism while cleaning dishes by hand? Of course the amounts we’re talking about are very small they don’t need optimization, but the efficientist within me is screaming revenge. I confronted our Condo fees with our neighbors and they have similar fees but swapped heating and hot water. Again, we should do nothing, we’re already spending very little… but bear with me while I say I’m paying extra attention to hot water usage since then!
• Health: 835 CHF. 701 insurance premiums and 134 doctor visits for BabyRIP in the past two months. Bills are late to come in Switzerland.
• Baby: 768 CHF. We indulged in BabyRIP this month. 230 in baby stuff (toys, clothing, nappies, swimming pool nappies – that cost a f***ing lot!) and 538 for 3 courses: baby swim, first aid for children and gym with the baby. Yeah, luxuries, but totally worth it (well, I don’t know about the gym, since Mrs&Baby are attending, not me). I’ve enjoyed the baby swim course, 4 lessons on Mondays mid day, while everybody else is at work. It’s been an amazing experience even though BabyRIP doesn’t fully realize what’s happening around her. She seems confused while in water. I guess it’s important to just make her comfortable with water, there’s no actual “swim” being done. The First Aid also was very cool. I learned how to practice basic life saving techniques and how to react to all kind of problems child (and adults too) can have, like chocking, drowning, head injuries, bleeding, tick bites and so on. Very useful.
• Groceries: 443 CHF. Below average month. Well done.
• Restaurants and Eating Out: 221 CHF. Just a dinner out, and a lot of ice creams (we’re Italians…) and few breakfasts/brunches out.
• Travel: 152 CHF. Spent few days of August in Austria to meet friends.
• Transport: 86 CHF. A Mobility Carsharing long usage (to/from Ikea) and some local transport tickets.
• Fees: 12 CHF. IB forex and trading fees for my investments (more on this later).
• Leisure: 6 CHF. A very leisurely month! I think this is for a pendant purchased by Mrs RIP. We went several times to swimming pools for extra baths with Baby&Mrs, but we just consumed a 12-entries card we purchased a couple of months ago.
• Gifts / Clothing: 0 CHF. No gifts and no clothing expenses. Wow!

I feel like it’s been a luxurious month, with (sadly not) infinite time together, swimming together so many times and indulging in late afternoon ice creams every day! And this has been one of the the cheapest months on record!

As I said, many major expenses have been postponed to September: travel, a new computer, a baby bed and other stuff. I expect September to be dramatic, and not only because I’ll have to come back to work…

Ah, I added nice graphs to the “2018 exp” sheet on my NW spreadsheet. you can now compare up to three months and up to three expenses. Discovered “conditional formatting” cells and [H/V]LOOKUP functions on google spreadsheet to generate dynamic graphs 🙂

Major Losses

Relatively low income

Enough said. And it’s probably going down in following months. Not in September because it’s a “stock month” (expected ~7-8k USD worth of stocks). Probably October and November will be new bottoms, unless Mrs RIP can get some money from unemployment. We’ll see.

Mr Market meh

It went up, then down down down, then up a bit, then down last two days of August.

US stocks did very good, both Large (+3%, +9% in 2018) and Small (+5%, +12% in 2018), while EUR stocks performed bad, both Large and Small. Emerging Markets are red and bonds are red too.

In general, I’d call it a slightly negative month for my portfolio.

Well, currency-wise I don’t know what to hope for anymore. A strong CHF is good, I’m earning in CHF so I wish for it to skyrocket. But CHF NW didn’t cross the million yet so… 🙂

The reason I don’t know what to hope for is that we don’t have clear plan for the future yet. In the meantime, I keep tracking NW in all currencies, with priority lane to EUR.

Btw, interactive Brokers introduced a new Account Management UI (now named Client Portal) that shows you portfolio performances nicely. My base currency in IB is CHF, so it seems my portfolio did really bad this month, but as I said it depends in which currency you measure it.

Other financial facts

Invested 5k CHF in the “Bond ETF from hell“: IEML

I recently decided to lower my stocks exposure and buy more bonds. According to the Spring Analysis, collectively with my friends, we decided to invest into 2 bond ETFs: a high yield corporate bonds ETF (WING) and a high yield emerging market government bonds ETF (IEML).

Each month I send 5k CHF to IB automatically to be invested. For the next 2-3 months I’ll buy bonds to make the actual allocation match the ideal one (you can take a look at the investing sheet of my NW spreadsheet).

This month was the turn of the IEML. As I showed you a couple of months ago, this shitty ETF is nosediving since inception. A share was worth 100 USD at inception, then it was 66 USD in April this year and just below 60 at the beginning of the month. I said “RIP, you stupid, why the hell you keep investing in a losing horse?” but then I said “because I should be greedy when others are fearful!!” and invested 5k at share price 59.55 USD! Then it dropped again and it’s now below 56 🙁

I’ll keep investing according to my strategy. I’m still short ~7k on IEML and ~11k on WING. Until December I’ll buy only bonds.

A minor note on accounting. Since Googlefinance API in Google spreadsheet can’t find the USD version of IEML fund anymore but only the CHF one, I needed to add a line to my NW spreadsheet to keep track of it and also keep historical values meaningful. Ordinary administration for an engineer.

Last minute update: invested 5k in WING too

My September 5k CHF automatic transfer has been executed on Friday morning August 31st, and by 9.30 AM I had already bought USD on the market (at a good price, USD just dropped several days straight) and then bought 982 WING shares at 5.289 USD per share (5.2k USD total).

Bond weight on my portfolio is moving close to ideal.

lowered expected income tax percent from 25% to 23%

You might have noticed some mismatch between last month metrics and this month deltas.

“RIP, do you really think someone dig into your spreadsheet that deep??”

Ok. got it.

Well, I had an entry in my calendar to decide whether to pay or not last chunk of expected City and Cantonal taxes advances. I’m a Swiss C-Permit holder, no more taxed at source, and I’m responsible for paying my taxes. So far, I’ve made 2 big advances in 2018 totaling 28255 CHF. A third chunk of 14127 CHF was suggested by Swiss tax authority and I intended to advance it in August or September. I took a look at my NW sheet and saw a large amount of expected taxes already due. I did my end-of-year 2018 projections and the third advance seemed even an underestimation of final tax bill.

So, paying the third advance seemed a no brainer.

Then I took a look at last year tax declaration: we ended up paying way less than this year forecasts while not earning much more. I then adjusted expected tax percent from 25% to 23%, which leads to a final projected tax bill still much higher than last year, but more reasonable. With new expected projected taxes for 2018 making the third advance is borderline. In a month I should receive the final bill for year 2016, that should be ~8.8k CHF in my favor, which is a perfect amount to forward directly into 2018 taxes. I’ll tell Tax authority to put my credit toward 2018 taxes and I’m good to go until tax declaration for 2018 and final tax bill.

So: no third advance to 2018 taxes and a lower expected 2018 tax rate of 23%.

That was applied retroactively, making us instantly (virtually) richer 🙂

“… cheating your way to the million 😉”

Oh, get lost! 😀

keep lowering my flat value by 1k EUR per month

Until 60k. We’re at 68k now. It’s a death by thousand cuts.

Contacted the realtor mid month for an update. They showed the flat to someone but none was interested. Super sad. We even lowered the official advertised price. Maybe it’s August, nobody’s working in Italy right now. Not even realtors.

Other Facts

Fatherhood

BabyRIP turned 4 months old this month 🙂

She’s finally using her hands properly and grabbing things around, including my hair (and my chest hair). She’s attempting some prone/supine rotation with mixed (and funny) results. She’s starting getting more vocal and complaining about things. She’s still in the top 0.1% of cuteness and calm for a baby her age though 🙂 When I tell friends that she sleeps 8-10 hours straight per night I get envy looks, worse than those I get when I tell them my net worth!

As I said in the expense section we indulged in some classes with/for her. I attended the Baby Swim class with her and the First Aid for Kids for her. Mrs RIP is following a gym class with BabyRIP. It’s ok, we just need to stop spending ridiculous amount of money on experiences she’s going to forget in a min… too late, they’re already gone!

We also splurged a bit on books and toys. Mrs RIP is passionate about baby toys and she also started making some with her hands. Problem is: DIY material in Switzerland costs more than the more expensive finite product on Amazon…

We’re also reading books on parenthood. Mrs RIP is reading about breastfeeding, weaning and Montessori education. I’m reading (in my very spare time) two interesting books I recommend to nerds like me: Brain Rules for Baby and Dirt is Good.

And just at the end of the month, to celebrate an “almost below 4k CHF month”, we went on Amazon and purchased books for kids, for BabyRIP. I mean for BabyRIP when she’ll be 7-10 years old. Yes, we’re crazy. We fell in love for 2 amazing books from the same author Aleksandra Mizielinska.

The books are Under Water, Under Earth (best book ever, really) and Maps. They’re both big books. I mean BIG. Take a look at this page on the authors’ website (in Polish) to get an idea of the size and content

Why did we buy books that she can’t read before 6-7 years? I don’t know. Regret nothing!

Paternity Leave

Sadly, my 10 weeks of paternity leave are almost over. I’ve been not working since beginning of July and those have been the best two months of my life! Nothing fancy, no real vacation, just staying at home and enjoying our portion of Switzerland in this long, hot and amazing summer.

This is coming to an end, and I don’t know how I will cope with it. Only 2 weeks left. We’re going on the seaside for at least one week, close to Venice. After that, either another week there, or a week in Croatia, or few days in Milan and then back to Switzerland somewhere mid second week of September. We’ve not decided yet. Sad sad sad, turbo sad.

Anyway, these 2 months gave me a real taste of what FI life could  look like, and that’s the life I want. I spent time to work on my projects (without the structure I wanted, this is something I’d like to improve in after FI life), time to stay with my family and time to do some sport. Perfect life. Only problem, the awareness that this is temporary (for now). Due to that, I didn’t set up my life to match my ideal life. I tried several things, a sort of tasting menu when you try out a new restaurant. It’s ok, but it will be better once I have total control over my time, without an expiration date. By total control I mean over predictable events. As the stoics would say, always keep in mind that one day you’ll die (memento mori) and always welcome random events (amor fati).

As time passed, I found myself more relaxed and calm. I think I told you I used Hooli as a coworking office for these 2 months. Initially I went there 4 times per week, then 3, 2 and last week only one day.

I felt less pressure to be productive with my time, which is both awesome and awful. Awesome because I feel relaxed, calm. Awful because I fear the lack of external motivation could dodomize (to not be confused with…) me.

As I said, I think I’d structure my time in a more rigorous way if it were my “work”, or my official main activity once “retired”. But I don’t complain: I was able to produce a lot of content for my blog, read, write, study some philosophy, do some self analysis, do sports… more on that soon.

Blogged much more (but planning to slow down now)

I’ve put a lot of effort in this blog in August, and I’m very happy with that. I’ve focused on “quantity”, on articles getting published, on writing for its own sake to check my passion level, to see if it annoys me or burns me out after a while. Guess what? No, I don’t “had enough” yet. I love it even more. I love the process of writing, because it helps you thinking better. More on this later.

About the blog: I published 7 articles in August, I got interviewed by a famous newspaper in Switzerland, I’ve been featured on other blogs and somehow at Hooli my blog started being mentioned in Investments workshops (which is both good and bad). I’ve also been contacted for other collaborations (even paid ones!)

I admit it, I had a pageviews target. Which is the gray line here:

I wanted to see if investing more time into my blog would have resulted in more engagement, even in a month – August – where people are relaxing at the beach. I aimed to “all time record”, even though 2018 has already been a terrific year for traffic growth. I reached all time record, then I reached the gray line, then I exceeded my expectations by 36%. Wow.

I don’t know when hosting companies start calling you to upgrade your plan. This has not happened yet, so I assume my numbers are not that big – and that’s ok. I’m scared of growing more and have to spend time in “webmaster tasks”. I want to produce content, I’m already annoyed by my minor “webmaster issues” like enabling SSL certificates and blah blah blah. Yeah, I know, I’m a software engineer and a web developer. But please not here, here I just want to write 🙂

Anyway, I’ve published 7 articles, I wrote a lot (not only for the blog) and I plan to keep doing it. I’d like to add more “quality” in my writing, that’s why I’ve also spent time on researching “how to write better”.

The blog is not the end goal, like FI is not my end goal. They’re both tools to improve my freedom and explore my passions. I’m system oriented, not goal oriented. I’ll pivot my writing one day. Essays? Books? Novels? Professional financial articles? Philosophy? Fiction? theater scripts? Who knows!

On reading, writing, lifelong learning…

As I said, apart from some sport and time with family, main activities during this paternity leave have revolved around reading and some form of writing.

I classify reading in high (books, philosophy, structured learning on a subject), mid (blogs, youtube videos not about cats, reddit discussions, medium, listening to podcasts, binge reading about a specific person/topic) and low (facebook, news, youtube videos about cats). I did a good job in keeping low/(mid+high) ratio very low. Yes, I count podcasts and youtube videos as reading 🙂

Same for writing: high (self analysis, essays, book writing), mid (blogging, journaling) and low (social media, political fights, whatsapp farts). Yes, I consider blogging a mid level writing. Sorry for not giving my full self to you, or for not being able to produce higher quality content.

I like to write because it helps me thinking clearer. I ended up listening few talks by professor Jordan Peterson which… wait, WAIT! I know he’s a controversial person! I listened to some of his negatively-jaw-dropping talks about feminism, gender inequality and other discriminatory topics and I felt a urge to pickaxe my monitor. But this guy also produced positively-jaw-dropping material worth a look. And a second one. And a third one. Listen to this short talk of him on the “power of writing” (or if you prefer, this one edited and backgrounded with relaxing music). He advocates that writing is the best way to teach people critical thinking. In his words:

The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write. Because there is no difference between writing and thinking. And one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something. Well you have to do this assignment. Why are you writing? Well you need the grade. No.

You need to learn to think. Because thinking makes you act effectively in the world.

Thinking makes you win battles you undertake. And those can be battles for good things. If you can think and speak and write you are absolutely deadly. Nothing can get in your way. So that’s why you learn to write.

I can’t believe people aren’t just told that. It’s the most powerful weapon you could possibly provide someone with. And if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a presentation, if you can speak to people, if you can lay out a proposal…God! People give you money, they give you opportunities, you have influence. That’s what you’re at universities for.

Being articulate is the most dangerous thing you can be. Here’s your sword, here’s your M-16, here’s you bulletproof vest. You learn how to use them.

I love it. I really love the way he puts it. Here’s my thumb up, Dr. Peterson – but you’re still an ass for your “other ideas”.

Following Jordan Peterson lead me to his Essay writing template (a word document). Reading that template motivated me to try to write essays and gave me some tools to improve the quality of my writing. At least it gave to me an insight on how a professional writer writes. Fascinating!

About writing quality, I also found the smartblogger blog useful. If you don’t mind clickbait titles and focus on blogging you might find it useful as well.

As I probably mentioned in an earlier post, I’m also a fan of Ryan Holiday who wrote a lot about writing, reading, and personal knowledge management (but he’d kick my ass for “wanting to be a writer”).

This month I finished reading “The subtle art of not giving a F***” by Mark Manson, a life changing book. It impacted my life with the same “emotional ripple effect” Your Erroneous Zone (by Wayne Dyer) did exactly 10 years ago, at the time of my first emotional rebirth. I consumed tons or online articles by Mark Manson and actually considered subscribing to his blog for something like 4 USD/month. Didn’t subscribe so far, frugality habits die hard!

Started reading “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb. It’s a difficult read. What I learned in this first half of my life is that enlightenment is found in discovering that there are higher mountains once you reach the the top of what you though was a very high mountain. So let’s climb! Problem is: this book is the third one by Taleb on his deep line of thought. It feels wrong to start reading this one skipping the first two: The Black Swan and Skin in the Game. I might buy and read the other two first, or jump to other difficult books (Ayn Rand, I’m looking at you). Don’t know yet.

Other people/resources I consumed this month:

• Morgan Housel. He’s a business and financial journalist who wrote so many amazing articles and essays. He focuses on psychological aspects of investing and money. Here some of his best writing: The Psychology of Money (best ever), The greatest story ever told (awesome), spectrum of Financial Independence, Optimism vs Pessimism, On being wrong, Useful Hacks and many many more. Amazing reading.
• Nat Eliason. I don’t remember if I already mentioned Nat. Nat is an awesome writer and thinker. I love his posts. I discovered him for his anti social media posts (1, 2) while reading about Cal Newport. Then I rediscovered him for writing, learning, thinking (best one ever) and again for psychology and political outrage and social disobedience. I stopped fighting over politic on facebook thanks to him. He knows too many things.
• Shane Parrish (Farnam Street). Shane Parrish is another great thinker of our era. His blog is mostly about learning and reasoning. As he wrote “Mastering The Best Of What Other People Have Already Figured Out“. Best articles I’ve read: principles, learning, probabilistic thinking, first principle reasoning, mental models (awesome), antilibrary, stoicism and countless more.

I read and write to become a better version of myself. To improve my thinking and speaking skills. To live a deliberate life and achieve self actualization. To make best use of the time and freedom Financial Independence will buy me back. I can’t recommend it enough. And it works the other way around too. Becoming a better version of myself helped growing my career to the top, and landed myself a well paying job at Hooli. I can’t recommend it enough.

Anyway, this writing thing is something that has to be postponed for a while. I’m traveling in September and I’ll be back to work mid month. Time is running out. I’ll blog much less. I’ll write much less. I’d love to make writing my main activity but now it’s time to slow it down. If I feel too uncomfortable with that… that would be the answer to my midlife crisis and I knew what I would need to do next 🙂

Speaking about that…

Didn’t make many progresses on my midlife crisis

I know I know, I said August will be the month where… but it didn’t happen. I don’t even know what I expected from my self analysis, maybe I’m subconsciously taking decisions and finding my internal soundtrack for the second act of my life.

I’ve been writing a lot of lists. Asking myself difficult questions. Writing down hypothesis and ideal futures. A lot of work. It’s hard to take decisions. My priorities, Mrs’s ones and Baby’s one don’t always align. We had family discussions (BabyRIP contributions were mainly farts and burps) over dinners. Let’s put it this way: we’re more scared than curious. Decisions are made either by fear or by growth. We’re driven by fear. If you want, this whole FI thing is a fear decision. The closer we get to freedom, the more scared we get. Mrs RIP is way more scared than I am, but I’m also not as brave as I used to be. I’m open to go on a new adventure, new country, new job, unemployment, writing full time… Mrs RIP is more risk averse.

Anyway, I’ll write a full post about it sometime soon. For now, the important thing is that while we’re not sure what to do, we keep adding options to our table, i.e. welcoming financial security, working on new skills, sharpening already good enough skills and so on.

Running a lot but eating too much: dropped half marathon dream

I’m doing great with sport but not so with food. Enough said. Didn’t lose weight, actually gained a little bit.

Running used to make me feel incredibly well after a couple of weeks of working out. This time it’s been 2 full months at 3-4 workouts per week and still little improvements. My knees and my feet hurt. I feel pain and suffer from that instead of enjoying it. I used to crave for physical pain from workout (not knees and feet pain though). Now I simply don’ want it anymore. This attitude prevents me from pushing harder and setting goals. Again, fear decisions (I might get injuries, I might feel uncomfortable…), not a good thing.

Some results started showing up in last week of August, when I ran 10.5km in 1h01, which is below my 6 min/km dignity threshold. Last year I run double the distance in less than double the time. Taking a look at exactly 12 months ago journaling entries, I was running faster, longer and more frequently.

I won’t run my half marathon this year, I suspect I won’t even be able to finish the race. But I don’t quit running, I’ll find a way to hold on during winter (and lose some weight as well).

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That’s all for Au,gu,st 🙂