When Steptember Ends

STEPtember is over now, which is good, because I'm tired.

It turns out that when you try to maximise the number of steps you're doing every single day for an entire a month and then finish it all up by going for a huge walk, you get pretty exhausted.

The real question is: was it worth it?

Summer Has Come And Passed

The first thing I I wanted to get out of participating in STEPtember was to connect with more of my new TPM colleagues.

It's important to have meaningful connections in any job, but it's particularly important when you're a TPM, as those connections allow you to more easily navigate cross-team boundaries and create outcomes, which is a good chunk of what you're expected to do.

Participating in the TPM specific STEPtember stuff definitely increased the number of TPM's I have a casual and social connection to, but I wouldn't say it was a mind-blowing improvement.

The total number of TPM's who were paying attention to the event was relatively low, and the total number of TPM's actively participating in the bits that were meant to facilitate connection was lower again.

This was not the fault of the organisers though. They did a fantastic job, drumming up interest via multiple forums and participating extensively themselves.

It's just that wrangling a group of busy people and encouraging them to do something slightly outside of their normal day-to-day is hard.

You know what they say, you can lead a TPM to a social activity, but you can't make them participate.

The Innocent Can Never Last

The second thing that I wanted to get out of participating in STEPtember was a general increase in physical activity.

At the start of 2024 I had a good pattern going. I'd get up, do some stretches, do some weights training, walk my dogs and sometimes add swimming or jogging into the mix for a bit of cardio, all before heading off to work for the day.

That fell by the wayside as a result of a few particularly disruptive life events, like a death in the family and that whole thing where I changed my role.

At least that's what I think happened. With me, it's hard to tell why I break a pattern, but when I do, it tends to stay broken.

STEPtember was a good opportunity to challenge myself with something different and take some baby steps back towards a higher level of physical fitness and hopefully a lower level of physical fatness.

The good news is that I was definitely more active.

I ended up doing ~550,000 steps over the month, 47,000 of which were on the very last day. That's a solid improvement over the typical 250,000 or so I'd usually do.

The bad news is that I didn't lose any weight, which just goes to show that it doesn't really matter how active you are if you're not also paying close to attention to what is going into your body as well.

Eh, lesson for next time.

Ring Out The Bells Again

The third thing that I wanted to get out of STEPtember was to contribute something to humanity as a whole, aka money for the fight against Cerebral Palsy.

I did okay, raising a total of $145.

A big thank you to everyone who donated, and if you didn't get a chance yet, you can still donate by clicking on this link.

Now, obviously, $145 isn't exactly game-changing money. In fact, it's barely 6% of the amount that I raised for the Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation by streaming Helldivers 2 back in May.

That's okay though, every little bit counts.

In retrospect I could have pushed harder, made more of a song and dance out of it over the course of the month and really harped on about that long walk at the end, maybe even streaming it live.

I didn't because I was busy and also because I don't really like asking random people for donations.

Maybe next time I could do something similar to what I do when I stream games for charity, trapping observers and participants in an intricate web of incentives and penalties where the only person that wins is the charity.

That's usually pretty fun.

Like We Did When Spring Began

At the end of the day, I enjoyed my participation in STEPtember and I would do it again. It's a good cause, it was a good way to connect with my colleagues and it made me think about how I could be more active.

I'll probably try harder if I do it again though, because there is a part of me that was decidedly unhappy that I ended up as low as I did on the Atlassian leaderboards, both from a steps and donations perspective.

Clearly I'll have to step up my game.