gregular

There was a deal I saw today on Living Social to sign up for the event so I went and signed up. So I'm in! I'm looking forward to it, just gotta get my cardio up a bit I've been a little lazy on it this past month.

Hey Rangers, I've decided to do my second challenge here. I'm hoping to get inspired to add some new ideas into my regular work out and move away from being focused almost solely on strength training. I'm going to keep my goals fairly simple. 1. Continue What Going to the Gym 4 or 5 Times a Week I think that five times a week might be a little much and i could figure out how to squeeze everything I've been doing into four days easily, but I've also found that the more often I do sometime a week the more likely I'm going to continue doing it. I've been sort of following the ideas from this article on Tim Ferriss's blog since I started going to the gym at the start of October. I've kind of broken with some of it though because I've added doing the overhead press on days 1 and 4, and one day each of pull-ups, chin-ups, and dips usually on the days I feel least strapped for time. I also end each workout with 4 minutes of tabata on the elliptical machine and then stretching. I'm not looking to hit any particular benchmarks, I would like to get my pull-ups closer to twenty in the first set, I'm at 11 right now and I think this might be doable. I'd also like to add a few tenths of a mile to the work I do on the elliptical machine. 2. Continue with habit building Besides working out, I'm currently building up two other habits. A. The first is writing at least 2000 words everyday. As of today I'm on a 118 day streak for this, and I'm aiming not to break it (who breaks a streak on something like day 143?) B. Coming up with ten ideas each day. This is a baby habit and one I keep breaking. I'm at day 11 right now in this one. I would like to add a new habit for January, something exciting like clean everyday for at least 15 minutes. I'm not looking to really focus on starting this for another couple of weeks though, but by the midway point of the challenge start tracking a new habit (which might not be cleaning, I'm still working on what I really need to be focusing on right now). 3. Be more social Last challenge I just stopped keeping track of anything going on here. I'd like to change that, and be a somewhat more active participant this time. I also need to start reaching out to people for business stuff, so that is something else I'm looking to improve on right from the start of 2015. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to quantify this yet so I can keep track and give myself a grade. I think that's enough to focus on for this challenge. Most of it is more maintaining things I've started this fall, but this year I'm aiming to be consistently better and not burning out over tons of new things that I'm excited about for a week or so and then find too tiring to keep up with.

I didn't even think about there would probably be a lot of stairs involved, but I guess that's about the same as having a lot of running uphill.

I've never done one of these races before but I'm looking to give it a try. Is there anyone else in the area that is going to do this race? I'd love to start a team for support for this, unfortunately in 'real-life' I don't know anyone who would be interested in trying this sort of thing. Anyone interested?

The holiday season has been hectic and I haven't been keeping up with social sites at all. I have been doing my challenge though! I guess it is time to grade myself: 1. Lose ten pounds, get to 180 lbs. No. This wasn't possible. Going back to the SMART mini-challenge I should change my answer to this being unrealistic. I thought since I lost ten pounds in a month I could lose another ten in six weeks. I've weighed as little as around 175 as an adult, but that was from barely eating and being unhealthy. I don't know if I can actually make 180 without doing to drastic weight cutting measures. For most of the challenge I hovered around 190, in the past couple of weeks I dropped to 185. But, I did have to buy a new belt when my old started to be to big to function properly. I can wear a smaller size of shirts than I've ever fit into as an adult, and I think I'm all around leaner than I was at the start of the challenge. I should have taken measurements and focused on that and weight. So while I didn't lose the weight, I think this was still a success because the weight that stayed was definitely an increase of muscle. 2. Increase deadlift from 185 to 235 - maybe a bit much, but I'd mentally just like to have those 45's on the bar. Yes! I did one set of 5 at 235 today. I had issues a couple of weeks ago when I tore a callus lifting 225, and it took me a bit to heal up and feel confident enough that I could lift 225 or more again. 3. Increase bench presses by 20 pounds - feel like I'm at a plateau at 115 Yes! I'm plateaued right now at 145. 4. Increase squats by 30 pounds - currently at 125, I feel like I'm about to plateau here soon. Yes! I'm currently at 165, and I did one set of five for 175 this weekend. 5. Increase overhead press by 20 pounds - currently 65. Yes! Sort of. I can't get all five sets for five at 85 yet, but I'm at 5,5,5,5,4 for the past couple of weeks. This exercise is surprisingly more difficult than it looks. 6. Do 5 unassisted pull-ups and 10 unassisted chin-ups. Yes! No! My one set max in pull-ups right now is 8 and chin-ups is 9. Pretty close to success. 7. Get my HIIT to 15 minutes with 30 second intervals at level 16 for the entire duration - currently at 12 minutes with a 50/50 mixture of levels 15 and 16. I could have done it. I was running short on time a couple of weeks ago so I decided to try doing tabata instead of the fifteen minute 30/30 intervals that I had been doing and loved how much it kicked my ass and would save me about an hour at the gym every week. When I quit this exercise I was doing fifteen minutes with half of the levels at 15 and half at 16. I'm sure that I could have achieved doing the whole thing at 16, but I was also kind of obsessed each day at slightly increasing the difficulty while also trying to increase the distance and speed I was going at, and I couldn't go as fast at all 16 yet. 8. Cut out sugar from my coffee - down from 3 packets of sugar to less than 1 right now. Yes! Midway through week one I stopped taken sugar in my coffee and I haven't slipped on this one. About halfway through I stopped tracking most of what I ate. I'd like to start this up again though. The Christmas season is hectic and I was enough to keep eating fairly well and going to the gym everyday that I planned to. I would probably give myself a B for this challenge. I did everything I set out to do, but I could have been better about keeping track of my food and I could have been more active in keeping up with this and helping other people out.

I've missed most of the mini-quests, but I've been silently chugging along with my personal challenge. For the next challenge I'm going to choose to be a Ranger.

I'm finally through some of the problematic but delicious Thanksgiving leftovers so tomorrow I'm going to be back to be more disciplined about my eating. Finished with my week at the gym. The hand injury made pull-ups quite painful after the first couple of sets. I did succeed in doing a new personal best of six in the first set. I could only get through three sets with quickly diminishing results before I decided that it was stupid to keep trying for the day. I need to get caught up on the mini-quests from the past two weeks. I'll try to get to that in the next day or so.

Update: After a break for traveling I'm back to my regular work out routine. Feels good to be back at it. On Sunday I switched from doing cardio on the recumbent bike to using an elliptical machine because I was too impatient to wait for one of the two bikes to open up. After quite a bit of awkwardness and a few minutes of trying to get my arms and legs to move in synch with each other I got the hang of it. I might like it better than the bike and I feel like I'm getting more of a workout in the fifteen minutes of intervals. Or maybe it just makes me sweat more. Yesterday on my last deadlift I succeeded in tearing off a callus on my left hand. This was an unexpected injury and doing some research on how to prevent this from happening in the future taught me some things that I should have looked into first. I thought as the calluses on my hands got bigger that they would protect my hands more not make my hands more prone to injury. Opps. Today I returned to the gym with my hand wrapped up to do squats and overhead presses, those weren't lifts that use that part of my hand so I'm not sure how well the wrap worked. Tomorrow will be bench presses and pull-ups, so I'll learn then if I'm going to be sidelined for some of my lifts for a couple of weeks. Eating isn't going as well as I'd like, Thanksgiving leftovers are delicious but they also have a few foods that it would be better if I avoided. They are in moderation though.

Sounds like your doing a great job with this challenge!

I haven't been logged on to the site for the past week or so because of the holidays. The week before Thanksgiving I cut my work out schedule into two parts to try to sort of make up for the days I'd be off. This wasn't the smartest idea I ever had. My second to last set of lifting I was doing deadlifts and I moved the wrong way after I had the bar raised and it felt like I popped a muscle out of place under my left armpit in the back. It didn't hurt much, but it was a kind of nauseating feeling. Because I'm not the smartest I then decided to push through one more set at a lower weight and didn't feel any pain there at all. My back has been tight at times around that area for the past week on and off, but it generally feels ok. For the week of Thanksgiving I was pretty bad about my eating, I kind of expected this. I was better than I normally would have been though. I'd give myself a C for the week because I wasn't expecting perfection, but I was able to be more moderate than normal for the holidays. That week I did do some body weight exercises, nothing serious, just about fifty push-ups a day and a couple of days I did fifty air-squats. It was mostly five days of rest though. Yesterday I returned to the gym. I think it might have been all the rest, but I lifted heavier than I had been lifting in the previous weeks. I hit new personal bests in squats, and for the first time I was able to do all five sets of five reps of the overhead press at 85 lbs. I also hit my best average speed for my cardio and was able to do the HIIT for 15 minutes of 30 seconds on and off. Felt great about the workout. Today I just got back, and again I showed improvement in my exercises. I bench pressed five sets of five at 135, before I'd be lucky to get one full set of 135 and then do three or four reps for a couple of sets and move back down to 125. I also did one more chin up in a set, getting my personal best in a set to 6, and did a total of 25 in five sets, 2 more than my previous best. I think the five days off was good, and I'm on a different schedule for which days that I go to the gym, which I think I'll be a bit happier with, but I'll have to see about this. I've also stayed off of taking sugar with my coffee. And to wrap up this scatterbrained update, my weight was down to 186 a week ago, so I'd lost 4 pounds since the start of the challenge, but it was back up to about 188 this morning, which I expected. I'm not sure if my weight goal is realistic.

I haven't figured out my alternative yet. I'm probably going to try to do some body weight exercises, I was thinking of maybe setting a mini-push up goal for the time that I'm away for the holidays.

I think the physics might be on your side for a larger object, maybe something with a less durable shell?

Added the signature and started following solstice tiger and miss america. I was kind of lazy in who I choose to follow and just went with people who updated recently. I should have added to my challenge to be more social on websites and forums.

Good luck in crushing those watermelons!

Good luck with your challenge! I just got into the Fraction Hawkeye run and it's become one of my favorite superhero arcs, so I had to check out your challenge when I saw the avatar!