Who will I be in 75 days?

If you’re reading this after the 20th March, 2026, I’ll be a completely different person…I think? Or maybe I’ll be me, but better? Or the same person in almost every day but very slightly different in one extremely important but equally intangible factor? Who knows!

To elaborate, my girlfriend and I (and a friend of ours) will be attempting 75 Soft this year, and I’m interested and excited to see what we’re like once we’re out the other end. For those who don’t know, 75 Soft is a “self-improvement challenge” where, for a period of 75 days (what a coincidence), you do your best to follow this set of rules:

Eat well, and avoid alcohol outside of social situations.
Exercise once for 45 minutes a day, with one day of “active recovery” each week.
Drink 3 litres of water a day.
Read 10 pages of any book, every day.

Unlike 75 Hard—the challenge this challenge is based off—you don’t have to start from zero if you lose your progress (and the rules aren’t quite as over the top, in my opinion), so I’m confident that we’ll at least reach the end. It’s an added bonus we can do it without missing any days!

The rules are, helpfully, left slightly vague, and they allow you to attach your own, more specific goals to them, which I really like. This is what we’ve all agreed on:

🍱 Eat well

For my girlfriend and I, this means cooking at home whenever possible and reducing the amount times we eat out or get takeaway. I wouldn’t say we do this a lot at the moment, but it’s an expensive habit to have in London and we often don’t even feel like it was money well spent after the fact, anyway. Committing to cooking more at home will almost certainly help us eat healthier and will definitely help out our wallets. We don’t really drink alcohol at home, anyway, so that part won’t be hard.

🏃‍♂️ Exercise once a day

I used to be quite good at exercising regularly. I completed Couch to 5k in the first half of 2024 and managed to keep a consistent habit through most of 2025 but was unfortunately thwarted due to winter (cold) and injuries (ouch). My plan is to alternate running and gym workouts to hopefully strengthen the muscles involved and ensure I can keep up the level of activity for the entire 2.5-month period. We’ve also agreed that 10,000 steps in a day is a worth substitute if we aren’t able to “properly” exercise for whatever reason.

🚰 Drink 3 litres of water a day

Not much here to say. I downloaded an app to help me track how much water I’ve had. Fortunately, tea and coffee also count!

📖 Read 10 pages a day

I already read basically every day so this isn’t much of an additional to my daily routine. I will be reading Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson, and I’ve actually being a little naughty and committed to 17 pages (😱) a day so that the end of the book will nicely coincide with the end of 75 Soft. It’s definitely been a goal of mine to read more each day, so I’m really happy this is part of the challenge.

I’m not really sure what to expect from this challenge, to be honest. I don’t believe it’ll be a silver bullet, life-changing experience that will somehow catapult me into the annals of greatness, but I definitely think I’ll feel proud to have completed it, and hopefully will have strengthened some healthy habits along the way.

I remember feeling insanely proud when I completed Couch to 5k. There was no need for me to start it, other than a feeling that I wanted to, and there was no goal for me other than to complete it. And sometimes that’s enough. We set ourselves arbitrary goals that we can work towards, and then we feel accomplished when we reach them!

So with all this said, expect a follow-up in March!