The return of the weekly challenge

So, yeah, my previous weekly challenges weren't all that successful. I'm the first to admit it! They weren't all spectacular failures, though, which is important to note--I am still pretty much Diet Coke free. I do have one every now and then, but it is super rare. So score one for me and the weekly challenge!

At any rate, I thought that given all the life changes I'm going through lately, and all the effort I am making to sort of reset my life, it would be appropriate to bring the weekly challenge back. As of tomorrow, I am going to give getting up early in the morning to run another shot. Not only will this be more convenient with my work schedule, it will also give me a chance to relax during the day and not worry about going running in the afternoon or evening, and will (hopefully) help me to avoid some of the crowds in Central Park (which have been exceedingly unpleasant lately).

On a semi-related note, I have started the 100 push-up challenge over again. Man, am I out of shape. Since today is September 1st, I think today would be a good day to make a commitment to strength training. I've been so bad about doing it consistently in the past, but lately the importance of it has really been driven home to me and I'm kind of scared of the consequences of not doing it. Case in point: a couple weeks ago I visited my paternal grandmother, who is in a rehabilitation facility recovering from a knee injury. One of the women who is in the rehabilitation facility with her is there because her bones pretty much collapsed one day while she was watering her garden. Essentially, her bones were so porous as to be see-through, and got to a point where they could no longer support her weight. While she was watering her garden, they just shattered. Hearing about that was a wake-up call! And, to a slightly lesser extent, so was the difficulty of doing those push-ups this evening.

Weekly Challenge: 20 minutes

Last week I didn't have a weekly challenge, which was sort of nice because lately none of my challenges have gone particularly well. What can I say? 2008 has not been my year so far. I am, however, stubbornly refusing to believe that I should just throw in the towel, and I think that as long as I keep trying, at some point I will accomplish something! Yay for potential!!

For that reason, I am not abandoning my weekly challenges in spite of lackluster successes with them. And it isn't like I have completely ignored them! I just have mixed results with them. At any rate, this week I thought maybe I should just do something sort of basic, straightforward, and feel goodish.

It is unrealistic for me to expect myself to stick to a training schedule without life getting in the way, and I want to learn to not feel guilty when I am not getting in all the running I would like to. What I want to do this week is focus on just getting in twenty minutes of activity every day. Rest days will be 'active rest' days, and days when I run will be, obviously, more than twenty minutes of activity. The point here is not to exhaust myself but to keep myself in motion (even if it is just a walk around the block or through the park or something). I feel so much better when I have done some sort of physical activity than I do when I just sit around my apartment and get nothing done. I have been in such a slump lately, and feeling so lousy has really helped me to recognize how much better I feel when I just get up and do something, no matter how minor it is. So in an effort to preserve that feeling and chase the blahs away, I am taking on this 20-minutes-a-day challenge. Like I said, I am not working for a better body, just a healthier state of mind.

Weekly Challenge: Food Diary

I feel like proper nutrition is the bane of my existence. I go on a diet, I'm tired all the time; I go off the diet, I'm tired all the time and I gain weight; and so it goes. So I am going to try and start with a clean slate by keeping a food diary this week that will also include keeping notes of how I am feeling, particularly before/during/after running. I figure this way I can (maybe) finally get a clear idea of what is working and what isn't.

Simple, right? Why didn't I do this before, you ask? Laziness! Plus, it can be so embarrassing sometimes to look at what you have eaten and realize that yes, you really did eat about five cookies when you weren't actually hungry.

Weekly Challenge: Spring Cleaning

I am still looking at the title of this post and thinking maybe it isn't quite right. I want this week's challenge to be about nutrition, and maybe that title is misleading. Maybe it seems too closely related to...how can I put this politely...high-fiber diets? This challenge is diet-related, but not necessarily fiber-related. What I am really aiming for is a feeling of 'cleanliness'. It's a bit hard to describe. I just don't want the junky, weighted-down feeling I get from eating too much of what is wrong and not enough of what is right. So I think it is time to get things together nutrition-wise.

After my diet debacle, I decided it was time to just get back to regular eating. Call me crazy, but I feel like not feeling totally drained about midway through the day is a good thing. Plus last week, when I was no longer on the diet, I felt better while running. Hmm....At any rate, this week I would like to challenge myself to eat more balanced meals, but in a concrete way. What does this mean, exactly? 5 fruits and vegetables a day! From what I understand, 5 servings of fruit/veggies is the recommended minimum, and as I have a tendency to leave those things out of my diet (buying produce in NYC is a pain in the b-u-t-t), I am going to make a point of getting my minimum.

I am hoping to weight things a bit more heavily on the veggie side (3:2 veggie to fruit ratio), and surpass my minimum when possible. As usual, this is a challenge that I am hoping to stick with even after the week has ended.

Hopefully this one goes better than my early wake-up call...maybe once I have left the indulgent life of the graduate student behind I will try that again :p

Weekly Challenge: what next?

I'm pretty proud of myself: I managed to get up to 10 pushups over the past week. That's not bad--a jump from 2 to 10 (while being sick) is pretty respectable, I think. Especially seeing as how it was an eight pushup jump in a very short period of time. So I'm nowhere near G.I. Jane craziness, but it is a definite improvement.

And now it is time to pick out a new weekly challenge. I'm not entirely sure what to do this week. The one idea I've been knocking around has been getting up in the morning to run or workout. I tend to put it off until later in the day, but I have always wanted to commit to running in the morning, getting it out of the way, and having many hours in front of me during which I do not have to worry about when I am going to be able to fit a run in.

So here's my idea for this week: wake up around 6:30 or 6:45, eat something (a Luna bar, maybe?), digest, and be out for the run about an hour later.

This will probably be the most trying challenge to date but I guess it is now or never and I am going to have to rise to the occasion (and yeah, I admit that originally there was no pun intended there but then I thought about it and realized that it was punny, and I wrote it anyway. Feel free to groan).

Weekly Challenge: Drop and give me twenty!

Alright, so we are past the mid-week point. I was away from my home base until yesterday, so although I would have posted a new weekly challenge at the beginning of the week, I was unable to do so for logistical reasons. For that reason, this current weekly challenge is going to last from today until the end of next week, at which point I'll introduce a new one.

I'd like to start with an update about last week's challenge: giving up Diet Coke. It has been an incredibly difficult journey, but I have been Diet Coke (and all soda, for that matter) free since the beginning of my weekly challenge post about it on 3/31/08. You know, I wish I could say that I feel like it has had palpable health benefits, like a decrease in sluggishness, or...I don't know, something. But it hasn't really had any effect that I can track myself. Of course, that doesn't mean that it hasn't been healthier. I really, really miss it, but I am determined to stay away from it. And coffee is a pretty satisfying alternative.

And now on to the new challenge. I am constantly hearing about push-ups. Fitsugar encouraged readers to take the push-up challenge and even has a poll this morning about whether or not readers do push-ups; the New York Times recently ran a Wellness blog entry about how push-ups are the best measure of fitness levels; it seems like nothing screams ripped bad-ass quite like one-handed push-ups. Or, for that matter, one-handed push-ups with someone sitting on the back of the person doing the push-up. Oof. In the midst of all this hoopla about the miraculous push-up, I have an embarrassing confession to make. I am good for one, maybe two (on a good day), push-ups at a time. If I drop to my knees I can sometimes get through about ten, but that just doesn't have the same value as the true push-up. For a while I was confused because I can hold a plank like it is my job. I can even go through the entire plank, upward dog, downward dog cycle about a trillion times without ever touching the floor for a brief rest. But I can't do more than two stinking push-ups. What gives? It turns out that the strength I need, and that I don't happen to have, for a push-up is in my chest. I have strong arms, strong shoulders, a strong core, and a strong back, but weak pectoral muscles. So for the rest of this week and the week following this one, I am determined to work on this strength and, hopefully, by the time I am done, I will have broken my two push-up record. All I am looking to do is three to five, really. I don't mind starting slow. I just want to start somewhere.

I am interested in hearing about your experiences with push-ups. Do you do them? Do you enjoy them? How many can you do? Any fancy tricks (one-handed, clapping in between, etc.)?

Weekly Challenge: It's not you, Diet Coke, it's me.

Rather than take on a bunch of changes all at once, I have decided to experiment with a new method: taking one challenge at a time, and trying it on for a week. I get overwhelmed when I think of all the things I should change about myself--eat fewer refined carbohydrates, cut down on sugar, stop drinking diet soda, eat more protein, eat more fruits and vegetables...the list goes on...and on. Although I know things could be far worse, I do have bad habits that I would like to break. And I've heard it said that it takes twenty-one days to break a bad habit. My goal here, though, is to just take something on for a week, in the hopes that the effort I have made toward improving something (and the supposed benefits that will accompany said effort) will be sufficiently rewarding that I will be encouraged to maintain my healthy habit.

This week's challenge? No more diet soda. This is going to be hard. I love the taste of cold Diet Coke. I love the first sip in the morning, I love the way it fizzes, I even love the way it smells. The problem? Well, at this point, the list of negatives far outweighs the positives. Granted, this may have something to do with the fact that the one real positive is the caffeine boost. But the negative effects of diet soda in general are actually pretty disturbing. Recently, studies have shown an association between diet soda and weight gain, metabolic syndrome, and heart problems, just to name a few of the seemingly endless soda-craving killers. In recent years, I have significantly reduced the amount of Diet Coke I drink, so cutting it out completely will, admittedly, not be as hard as it would be if I were going from a daily dose to nothing at all. For caffeine, I will be drinking tea, and probably coffee as well which, though probably not the best choice, is still far healthier than the dreaded diet soda.

I will post about how the challenge is going at the end of the week. Until then, I will be fighting off the urge to have a Diet Coke IV hooked to my veins.

What will you challenge yourself to do this week?