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Maybe peeps on here have already seen this, but I just discovered it and thought I'd share. Just a bit of fun...

Scout's Plumber Toolbox Race Week 6 : Bike 10km or Run 5km or Swim 1km Mario doesn’t have to rescue any princesses at the moment, so he wants to work on getting faster so when he does have to save another princess he can get there quicker. He doesn’t want to venture too far from the Mushroom Kingdom, so he was planning on a triathlon using his bike in World 1-1, running in World 1-2, and swimming in World 1-3, and stopping before getting to the castle in World 1-4. He would greatly benefit from having pacers during his race so we are going to help pace him during his race. The race will occur during week 6 of the challenge (August 31 to September 6). Decide if you want to pace him for a 10k bike ride, a 5k run, or a 1k swim (and for those over achievers, you can do more than one activity if you want to). This is being announced early so you can potentially incorporate it with your challenge goals and have plenty of time to schedule your bike, run, or swim. There is a quick poll to see how people plan to pace Mario during week 6. Prior to the week 6 race we continue to have weekly minis that awesomesue is working on

Hello! It's a me, Mario! Ok not really. Shawn here, if you don't know me yet, lucky you! After reading all the rules about the challenges and the guilds, I just couldn't get into it. To be honest, I was never interested in those types of RPG's. As a kid, I was more of a Mario player. My childhood consisted of dodging turtle shells instead of arrows. So to keep true to the purpose of Nerd Fitness's idea of "Level Up Your Life," I created my own challenge for the journey my girlfriend and I are on to build strength, lose weight and live a more happier life. (Follow us on Twitter, link is in our signature.) We just started this challenge today so we may need to make some tweaks along the way as needed. I have broken down my idea into sections below for easier understanding. I have attached 2 pictures for reference. Basics The objective is to go through each level (week) and try to obtain coins and avoid bosses to level up to the next world. All progress is tracked on a chart on our fridge. What is a level? A level is 7 days long. How do we advance to the next level? We have to earn 12 coins. How do we earn coins? We get 1 coin per day for a total of 7 coins. To earn the additional 5 coins we need to complete the level and earn a star, we have to do little challenges or other things that will level up our life (ex. reading a chapter in a book, putting money in our savings or towards a bill, cleaning our cars, etc.) Monday is our weigh-in day, if we lost weight, we get a coin. We can only get 12 coins per level to avoid earning too many coins early and slacking off the remaining levels. We need a total of 4 stars (48 coins) and a minimum of one 1-up mushroom to "warp" to the next world. More on the 1-up mushroom later. How do we get a star? We have to cash in 12 coins to earn 1 star. A total of 4 stars allows us to warp to the next world. What is a world? A world is a commutation of 4 completed levels. To warp to the next world, we need a total of 4 stars. After successfully completing each world, we can buy ourselves a maximum $10-$20 Prize each! (ex. LEGO's, new clothes, iTunes gift card, DVD, can opener, bubble wrap, w/e we want!) We can also save the cash each world to buy something bigger and better later. Oh and of course bragging rights to our pet. That's right Peter our rabbit, we're king! Can we lose coins? Absolutely! If we go about our day and do what we are supposed to, we get our daily coin no questions asked. However, if we encounter a boss and he defeats us, we lose all chances of earning a coin that day and need to earn that coin back on another day. What do you mean bosses? Bosses are different for everyone and should be specific to your own life. Bosses are things that represent our goals, our chores, our mentality, etc. The way a boss "defeats" us is by us not doing what we had planned to do. Bosses for us include not going to the gym, letting our depression take a hold of me, not having at least 1 game/movie night a week, not doing our chores, going over our calories on MyFitnessPal, etc. I included a picture of our "key" which shows you our bosses and the character that represents them. If the boss defeats us, we have to put his picture on our warp pipe for the whole level as a constant reminder that he won that day. What are red mushrooms for? We are given 3 red mushrooms in each world to be used as a free day where we still can get our daily coin even if we royally screwed up. Once we use them, we lose them until we start a new world. What are green mushrooms for? The extra life green 1-Up mushrooms are earned by trying something new and out of our comfort zone, whether it be a new food or a new activity. We need a minimum of one 1-Up mushroom to warp to the next world and we can earn as many as we want. Today I earned one by trying dehydrated jalapeno kale chips my coworker offered me, win! Is the Doctor in? If we are sick one day, we can call Dr. Mario and he will prescribe us a day of rest. If we're faking it however, he will charge us 1 coin so we have to be honest with ourselves and hold each other accountable. Doctors aren't cheap! How the chart works We tape our character to the pipe that is the current day and tape either our bosses or our coins to the pipe depending on how that day went based on the instructions above. Each day we move only our character to the next pipe leaving the previous days items still attached. (We laminated ours to make it easier and we can draw on it with a dry erase marker. Benefits of dating a teacher!) I put the star we're after on the last day for something to aim towards. We put the total number of 1-Ups, stars and coins we've earned to date next to the icons. We put the number level we are on and world we are on as well. We put our weight under our name. An example of what it should look like once we get it going is attached. What are those mystery boxes? Mystery boxes are something to add fun to the week. They can be anything we want. We saved a bunch of these box photos in a folder on our desktop and renamed each photo a specific item so we just open up the folder, hold the arrow key down to scroll through all the pictures at light speed and when we release the button, whatever picture we land on we read what it is titled and that is what we win, or have to do...mu ha ha ha! Some of our examples are: Do 15 jumping jacks, Other person has to do a plank, You pick next movie, Other person has to wash your car windows, etc. I know it sounds confusing but it really isn't. We hope it will bring an element of fun to our journey so we will no longer live like Gumba's! Think this is cool? So did the following: The NY Times calls it, "That was 6 minutes of my life I'll never get back." Borat said, "Very nice, great success!" Lil Jon screamed, "What!? Ooookkk!" Why be Mario if we can Super Mario! Thanks for reading!

*Presses Un-Pause Button* This is a challenge I started about 10 weeks ago but put on hold for a while. I'm still in recovery but I need to raise my game a bit. So back to the Donkey Kong Machine I go, to resume my goals with a little tweakage for post-op me. 1 Running Along Girders 1 long run and 2 short runs per week, looking again at technique and increasing speed. The long run will be less long but I'll keep this up and aim to work up to a full Tamsin trail distance (which is 11ish km, depending who you believe) by the end of the 6 weeks 2 Leaping Over Barrels At least 1 heavy squat/jump session per week. I kept this up for the first 3 weeks but in the post-op world I think it's pushing it a bit so I'll do stretches and deep core work daily instead 3 Climbing Ladders Keep working on "plups" - one test and general bodyweight/resistance work towards the elusive goal. I managed my first pullup in the crazy days before I went away and bloody glad I am of it too, but I won't work at increasing that for quite a while longer, so I will be looking at rebuilding my strength in non-traumatic work, doing full pilates sessions 2x per week, building up to sculling and b/w rows at the end of week 5 and slacklining in week 6. 4. Impressing Pixelated Babes at the Top of Towers ...and how else would I do that but by wowing them with my knowledge of the language of Camões, Saramago and Pessoa? So - another two chapters of L+D then. It worked well for me last time. Still another chapter and a bit to go on this one. I should be finishing a couple of short graphic novels too ("Astérix - O Domínio dos Deuses" and "Pessoa e Cia"). I kinda want to start another full novel instead of going back to the exercises but it's yin and yang baby, gotta keep the cosmic blancmange or the universe will crumble - these things are not to be trifled with. Is that enough pudding-related puns? Bonus Barrels: Get my weight down to 12 Stone (That's 168lb) by the end of this challenge. It's at 171 now. I'm hoping the fact that I'll be working harder will give my weight a solid nudge in the right direction.Keep my 3 streaks going: Daily Portuguese, Exercise and Teeth-flossing. In the last challenge I was counting walking as exercise but that was a special sitch. Walking is no longer a workout. I'm a mammal and walking is what mammals do: to qualify it has to be something that gets me out of breath. At least cycling, and even cycling is cheating.The Squeak project I didn't do during the Pac-Man challengeSome other items from my to-do list: finding out about time signatures in music; making lists of various tedious money-related things; tidying the 18ck bedroom And I'll be doing some other stuff too, but I will just keep the goals simple with these. Also, I seem not to have attached point values to these. Let's call it 1 - +4 STA 2 - +3 CON +1 STR 3 - +3 STR 4 - +1 WIS +1 CHA Bonus Barrels - +1 CHA +1 CON Here's Donkey Kong for those of you too young to remember. Now get off my lawn!