My 75Hard Journey
I completed 75Hard (primer 👇), and these are the results:
- I read 11 books in 10.5 weeks and reinvigorated a passion for all things information protection and contemporary technology
- I became an advocate of getting up very early: 4 am-5 am kinda early
- I lost 41 lbs and 15% body fat.
- I now fully appreciate the differences between discipline and motivation.
This blog is more than flexing the weight loss; there are easier ways to shed some timber, IMHO. I write this to show people that focus, determination and discipline trump fleeting motivation and grandiose aspirations. Essentially…
Hard work beats talent when talent fails to show up.
As I progressed through the challenge, I received plenty of positivity across social media. Being told that your dedication to a goal has inspired others to make profound changes in their lives feels kinda good. I wanted to write about the things that went well, the tips I adopted and the challenges I experienced. That’s all included below. Enjoy!
Strawberry-blonde pop royalty Ronan Keating once said life is a rollercoaster, you just gotta ride it. A rather apathetic, laissez-fare assertion inferring there’s little we can do about our direction on this planet. We board our figurative fairground ride and see what happens. Chips are dealt, run with it.
As I type this, I’m not sure that a) Ronan even wrote said song, nor b) did he pour much existential evaluation into the meaning behind the ditty or the parallels a 41-year-old CSO would draw 20 years later, but my point — yes I have one — is that life is what you make of it, and difficult things generally bring the greatest reward. 75Hard certainly falls into the categories of difficult and rewarding!
Why 75 Hard?
Professionally, I am very much in the camp of failing to plan is planning to fail— meticulously (read ‘annoyingly’, ‘obsessively’) organised and recently described as a metronome of reliabilityby a colleague I hold in high regard. Surely, therefore, those principles apply in all facets of life? Wrong.
It’s all too easy to reinforce thought patterns and habits negatively. I had every excuse going. Do any of these sound familiar? 👇
- I have a budget report to present
- ..or an audit committee to prepare for
- This vuln might affect us, I need to research things
- I have three kids, they need shit doing
- I am an executive security person — people don’t understand how hard it is for us to find time for exercise
- I’m injured
- I have the school run to do
- It’s 8pm and I’ve been hard at it all day. I deserve some downtime
The above are all excuses. They are pretty weak ones too. In reality — I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want to prioritise my personal health and happiness over more nebulous, societally-accepted definitions of success.
For me, 75Hard was a reset. An opportunity to prioritise me — physically and mentally. Everyone thinks 75Hard is about losing as much weight as possible. Bollocks. It’s a mindset shift focused on personal discipline and separating the immediate from the long-term. The tactical from the strategic. You must separate motivation from discipline because motivation is finite and sporadic. I’m motivated to run outside if I’ve watched Rocky that afternoon. I’m motivated to jump on the WattBike after seeing a Chris Hoy Olympic montage, but motivation isn’t going to get you through two workouts a day for the best part of three months — discipline is. Discipline became my friend. I’d decided that this challenge was important to me, more important than the immediate gratification or dopamine hit from junk food or wasting an hour on the sofa watching banal TV.
Embarking on 11 weeks of rigorous training and personal development should be something you go into knowing it’s going to be tough. Unequivocally, you’re going to have days when you don’t want to get up early, you don’t want to run 10km, you don’t want to eat chicken and cauliflower rice (again), but you do it because you want to complete your challenge. That’s discipline, and I passionately believe that discipline can be developed and retained!
To make these sacrifices, you need a why . Everyone knows, rationally, that exercise and strict diets mean you’ll feel better, but people enjoy the pub, pizza and lounging around on the sofa with the dog. If you’re going to do this, you need to appreciate that the juice is worth the squeeze.
Watching Tik-Tok videos on 75Hard and deciding to do 75Hard is probably a model destined to fail. Your why needs to become your raison d’etre for the duration of the challenge. Going into Christmas overweight wasn’t somewhere I wanted to be. A lot of my why was to so my kids that the best results are congruent with the effort applied. 11 weeks of basically adopting the training programme and nutrition of a professional athlete.
What is 75Hard?
Let me start with what 75Hard isn’t: For everyone. I’ve read a tonne of rhetoric online saying it’s unsustainable, too difficult, can cause injury, etc. Moderation works for some: eat less, train more frequently. Broder, more nebulous guardrails that work for a lot of people. I needed something more difficult and prescriptive.
75Hard requires (per day):
- 45 mins x 2 of training (one session must be outside)
- Drinking a gallon of water
- Read 10 pages of a non-fiction book
- Not drinking alcohol
- No cheat meals/sticking to a diet
- Taking a progress photo
How I tackled each of these Requirements👇
75Hard allows the participant a tonne of flexibility in how they want to diet, exercise and read. The following worked for me, but I’m someone with a history of playing sports, getting up early and being rather competitive.
Train (45 mins) Twice a Day
From my limited research (read ‘none’), training twice daily puts many people off 75Hard. I feel unnecessarily in a lot of cases. Training, in a 75hard context is about movement. Getting off the sofa and getting active for 1.5 hours (cumulative) per day. That’s it.
I’ll say something controversial here because it’s fundamental to absolutely everything I’ve learned on this challenge:
Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day — me
Earth-shattering, right? I was the worse proponent of lazy, pompous excuses for not training. I’d convinced myself I didn’t have time. What I meant is that fitness wasn’t important enough to do instead of other things perceived as necessary and important: emails, returning a phone call, attending meetings. In reality, a healthy body is the foundation for mental wellness and professional success. That’s something I remind myself of now when I look at a jam-packed diary and wonder when I’m going to train. I remember that I’ll be a better Chief Security Officer, husband and dad if I find time to exercise everyday.
Also, training twice daily doesn’t need to be two ring sessions with Oleksandr Usyk. I found that a long dog walk and an intense run/cycle made the challenge doable.
A lot of my training, the walks mainly, was done at night, in the freezing cold. I reached a point where I almost enjoyed the discipline. Wrapping up warm and hitting the streets — often with the dog — served as strange punctuation on the day. I also discovered a love for tech books delivered through audiobooks. Who’d have thought that Microservices Security in Action would be digestable in audio form?
By getting up early every day, I was able to read but also to get shit done. The stuff you procrastinate with and generally waste time on throughout the day— Admin, family paperwork, online shopping…whatever. I front-loaded the day, allowing me time in the evenings to train.
Drink a Gallon of Water per Day
This was much more difficult than I expected. Not physically drinking the fluids but, well, you know…nature’s consequence of doing so. It became difficult to go anywhere too far away from a bathroom. I recommend drinking as much as you can as early as possible in the day.
I also advocate buying a receptacle capable of holding a gallon of water. Frequently refilling a bottle isn’t fun and is certainly inconvenient. I jumped online and bought a bottle like this 🔽
Read 10 pages of a non-fiction book
I love reading and writing. What 75Hard gave me was a reason to prioritise sitting down with a coffee and going back over the never-ending Kindle ‘read later’ library. I loved this part of the challenge, and I don’t plan on changing the format anytime soon.
It’s also the reading (primarily) that got me into the 4am club. I’m a proponent of the Daniel Pink Larks & Owls model of human behaviour and view myself as a lark. I’m underplaying Pink’s academic studies here, but suffice it to say that I perform analytical tasks and make better decisions in the mornings. Why, then, am I wasting hours lying in bed when I could be smashing the reading list?
So, at between 4am and 5am, I’d get up and quietly stagger to my office and read. I made the task infinitely easier by buying a coffee machine that ensured a fresh pot was brewed upon arrival. Probably a decent time to provide another Hodson tip
Do as many things as you can afford that will make the challenge more convenient
Have food prepared (more on that in a mo), snacks, etc. Anything that mitigates the ‘I cannot be bothered’ mindset that plagues so many people.
I am a big tech reader. I’ve never lost my thirst for professional knowledge so the reading I focused on was exclusively cybersecurity and cloud-natve architecture. Other people select personal development, marketing, health & fitness topics. So long as it’s non-fiction, you're good.
My list ⬇️
Google Cloud Platform for Architects: Design and manage powerful cloud solutions — I’m going to be working a lot more closely with GCP next year (more on that in another blog 😃)
The Art of Software Security Testing: Identifying Software Security Flaws
Practical Cloud Security: A Guide for Secure Design and Deployment
Agile Application Security: Enabling Security in a Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Web Application Security: Exploitation and Countermeasures for Modern Web Applications
Container Security: Fundamental Technology Concepts that Protect Containerized Applications
Hands-On Security in DevOps: Ensure continuous security, deployment, and delivery with DevSecOps
CISO Desk Reference Guide Volume 2: A Practical Guide for CISOs
Sticking to a Diet
75Hard doesn’t prescribe a diet. The idea is that you create a plan and stick to it. I went with:
- No more than 1,800 net calories per day
- 158g of protein (minimum) per day
- That’s it.
The beauty of ‘net calories’ is that they incentivise training. The more I trained — well, the harder I trained — the more I could eat. Getting 158g of protein isn’t the easiest, not when trying to keep the calories off. I found that extra lean mince and chicken meatballs became staples. I ensured I had a weekly shop hit the front door every Friday. Not shilling here, but I used Muscle Food. Not the cheapest, but certainly reliable with a decent selection of high protein options.
No alcohol or cheat meals
This one was simply non-negotiable. No booze. You're the driver if you’re going to a party or work event. Same with those weekend pizzas or sweets — not happening. It’s 75 days, not 75 years. Discipline is key with this one.
Taking a progress photo
I’d read that many people had failed the challenge simply forgetting to take a photo. In some cases late into the challenge. I made weighing myself and taking a progress photo part of my early morning routine.
What’s next
I’m still training every day but I am having a couple of weeks at a slower pace while we down tools for the festive period. January to mid Feb will see a return to twice daily training and calorie counting.
Photos and General Timeline
