Jarric

Yeah, it was a pretty great night. And thank you! I could save two people from a burning building, providing that they were no more than 100ft from the door and I had to move in a straight line across a flat surface. It would also help if they handles Thank you! Funnily enough, on our pub crawl the other week one of my friends said that the vast majority of humans have ability scores of 8-12, and that my strength wouldn't be above 12 on that basis. Using Pathfinder 1e rules on carrying capacity I worked it out to prove him wrong, and calculated a strength score of about 15. (Using this table, if anyone's curious: Carrying Capacity – d20PFSRD) Thank you! A lesson in listening to my body I think. I'm enjoying it. The action economy is really easy to work with compared to PF1 - instead of trying to work out how best to use a standard action, a move action, and a swift action, you just get to do three things and decide what those are. It makes combat a little smoother and quicker, which is nice. My only complaint so far is that it's a pain to keep a manual character sheet for. As a bard I'm trained in most skills, as well as various generic things like armour, weapons, saving throws, spell attacks etc. Everything you're trained in scales with you level, so when you level up you need to change almost every number on the sheet. Thanks man! I was really good thanks! It's been a mixture of really busy and recovering from being busy/slightly ill, so I've not had much chance to update. Will try and do a proper recap this afternoon. Haha, well I was glad to get the chance to tick off a goal!

Tuesday was a good day. I should have got up early for a run, but I just had no drive or motivation. I procrastinated for a while, and eventually got out for a short 2 miles. It should have been a 2 workout morning, so that puts me on the back foot a bit. In the evening we had D&D - our new Pathfinder 2e game. We started out all laughing and joking and being very silly, but the mood changed somewhat as we got into our first fight with a dragon. It was only a baby dragon, but it was brutally effective, and very nearly caused a TPK with a monstrous breath weapon. We even had to look up the rules for death by massive damage, when Hummingbird, my gnoll bard, crit failed her save against the breath weapon and took 46 points of damage. At the time she had 18/28 hp. In D&D 5e I would have been permanently killed, in Pathfinder 1e I would have been extremely dead, but thankfully in Pathfinder 2e it wasn't quite enough to finish me off. Whilst I was unconscious for a couple of rounds I did a quick sketch of the dragon, so that helps with the drawing goal! Eventually we managed to finish off the dragon through the power of friendship, when Fazi-Shazi, our kobold redeemer, saved the life of a kobold on the other side, who switched sides and joined us against the dragon. Arguably we also finished off the dragon through the power of teeth, as it was Mfezi, our lizardfolk ranger/barbarian, who finally ripped its throat out. After that the game descended back into silliness. Xergbert, our lizardfolk necromancer, managed to nearly kill himself repeatedly falling off a moderately high ledge. Then most of the kobolds we've collected in these tunnels were assigned to players, and they all had an argument about what to do next with Fazi-Shazi. Then Fazi-Shazi had to have the same argument with the actual party, who didn't think bringing a load of kobolds into town was the best idea. This all lead to a bunch of very silly, very entertaining roleplay. Wednesday was a good day. Started off with crossfit, which started with 100ft farmers' walks. We were building up the weight and I wasn't really paying attention to how much I was lifting, just working through the sets. I decided to push myself for one last set at the end, which felt really tough but I got through it. My coach asked how much I'd lifted, so I counted it up. I realised I must have miscounted, so I counted again. Then I got someone else to count it, because that couldn't be right. That last farmers' walk was at 164kg (361#)! Pretty sure that's by far the most I've ever picked up in my hands! And all because I loaded by feel and didn't count the weight as I was going. Very pleased with that. After that we had a sweaty workout of dumbbell pressups to row, reverse lunges, and burpees over box. It was brutal, but actually quite fun. Work was long, and I stayed late to try and get some work finished off that's due for month end. I finished about half 6, and decided to pick up some beers, an oven pizza, and some garlic dough balls on the way home as I seriously couldn't be arsed to cook anything more complicated than that. I sat up late watching Questing Time, and then stayed up later watching other stuff on Twitch, to the point that it was half midnight when I finally got to bed.

Yeah, me too! I don't often do much in zero week, but I definitely was put off posting new challenges in the past because the forums weren't up when I wanted to write them. Yeah, it was a really good weekend. This week's not showing any signs of getting easier, so hoping for a quietish weekend now! Ah, fair enough. I think the problem is that the more intangible a job gets the less it feels like you've achieved something? Like, if you dig holes for a living, at the end of the day you can look back at all of the holes you've made. If you write reports for a living you can say "I've finished x reports/written x thousand words today". When your job is people management you're still doing plenty of work, it's just not as immediately obvious that the work has been done. I hope to never hit that tier of management, I see how hard the directors in my company work and I don't fancy it! Yeah, you can't please all of the people all of the time, but this feels like the best compromise for the most people.

Ah, I see. My first challenge was February 2016, so I either started on 4 week challenges or I don't remember my first couple being 6 weeks in that case. I liked the move from 4 to 5 weeks, but I think there's advantages and disadvantages to 4, 5, and 6 week formats to be honest. Hopefully not too many?

Sounds like a decent chunk of exercise to me, regardless of whether it was intentional! Professor McGonagall has my vote for a costume; that'll look cool.

Yesterday was a good day. I went to Crossfit, and felt absolutely knackered by the time I'd got through the warmup. It was a fairly chilled out workout, just going between d-ball loads, bench press, and chinups, in my own time. I'm not sure if that was a good or a bad thing - I definitely couldn't be bothered to do more than a chilled out workout, but maybe a timed workout where I didn't have a choice but to work hard would be better? I had a bit of fun with chinups at least, messing around with weighted chinups and with chinups hanging from nunchucks. Bench I did sets of 5 at 60kg (~132#), d-balls worked up to 70kg and about chin height loads. I continued to feel knackered all day, and I took a lot of calls at work which delayed me getting to stuff I actually wanted to do. I know I put in a good day's work but it didn't really feel like it. In the evening I cooked beetroot falafels - they were a lot of effort and turned out all gluey inside, so no idea what I did wrong there. We spent the rest of the evening chilling in front of mindless TV. 1 workout and teeth ticked off for the day, no drawing yet.

Welcome! I thought they were 4 weeks more recently than 6 weeks weren't they? I'm sure I started on 4 week challenges...

I remember four week challenges, they were good. It was lovely thanks! Not quite feeling myself at the moment, but I'm getting stuff done to a point

Good to know! Thank you No session, just a pub crawl. I hate to imagine the decisions our characters would have made by the end of that night

It's been fun! I never watched Mash when it was on the BBC so I can't compare, but I'm enjoying this series. It's silly comedy, with just enough real politics that it also feels usefully informative.

It's been a good weekend. Yesterday morning I was planning to go to Parkrun, but I ended up faffing around at home and missing the start by two minutes! So instead I decided to drive up into the hills and go for a 4 mile run up there. After that I went home and got myself ready, and headed out to meet my Pathfinder group for a pub crawl. I had a lovely time - they're such a great group of people and I really enjoyed spending the day with them. After about 10 hours of drinking, smoking, and talking nonsense I was very ready to go home - I got back at midnight and rolled straight into bed. Had a bit of a disrupted night for various reasons, some of which weren't even my fault . I made up for it by lying in bed until about half 11 this morning, which was blissful. We've spent the day catching up on TV - starting with episode 1 of the new series of Critical Role, then Taskmaster, The Last Leg, Late Night Mash - it's been a good day. Possibly not the best few days for my health and fitness goals - copious amounts of alcohol yesterday and today I'm sat on the sofa eating pastries and biscuits. Still, it's been an enjoyable weekend, so I'll take that!

I suspect which one you believe varies from day to day? If it helps to look at it another way - you may not be seeing any changes, but standing still is better than going backwards. As much as it's important to improve, it's also important not to lose what you already have.

Following along! Good luck with all the moving stuff - it can be a lot at the time but when it's done it'll all be out of the way really quickly.

Fingers crossed! It's just occured to me that I could use some new running headphones, so they might be my challenge reward if I manage to keep enough cash for them. Hey, American Monday-er here! Old school! OG NF! HOLLA!! Damn straight! ❤️ thank you Puck (though I'm not always so sure on the sanity ? ) Ah cool, here's hoping we both get our rewards then! Ah that'd be fun! I haven't watched it since I was a kid. Oo, those are some interesting thoughts. I suppose it makes sense that if you rest on the Sabbath, Sunday would then be the first day of the week. No, I'm resting for zero week, and starting the challenge proper on week 1. Nearly week 1 now though!

Sorry to hear that you're struggling so much with this; I hope it clears up soon. In the meantime it's a good time to rest as you say - it's good to hear you having a positive outlook on it.

Wooow, this is really good! I love that interpretation of the prompt.

I've had this issue a few times. A couple of options that might help (spoilered in case you don't want your players seeing):

I 100% agree, this sounds like a good approach. If I can offer an alternative perspective, runners are generally recommended to do some lower-body weight-training to help prevent running injury. You don't want to be smashing your deadlift PR anytime soon, but maybe some leg work at a comfortable level would be a good idea Oo yeah, that'd be cool.

Follow along! Sorry to hear about the nausea; that sucks. Have you changed anything in you diet or eating schedule that might have started that off?

Yeah, that makes sense to me, thanks. One thing at a time! Is starting the week on a Sunday an American thing? It's definitely a weird thing... On a complete tangent, I owe you a thank you. I've been getting aubergines in my Oddbox and not having a clue what to do with them. I saw on your thread you were making moussaka, so I made that for the first time last night. I somehow managed to split the béchamel in the oven (think the over was too hot), but it tasted lush. Good to have you man. Welcome, nice to see you!

Welcome back. It's really good to see you here. I can't really offer any advice, but I can talk about how I feel and that will either be informative or it won't! I've never really got to the 'big why' thing. Not with fitness, not with my career, and I don't have an idea of where I want to be in 5/10/20 years. For me, fitness is about picking a fun goal, and working towards it for a while, until it stops being fun. Mostly I'll have goals for the year, say to compete in x event or lift x amount. And quite often I'll come up short on those goals, and that's ok because the goals were never really the point of the exercise. The goals are always more of a direction than a destination, they tell me where to aim for, not when to stop. ETA: I guess if I had to sum up my approach, it would be: 'do cool shit, look good doing it'.

Thanks! I know it sounds a lot, but some of them are really short! More to the point, I'm quite accustomed to 7 workouts per week, so adding in the extra bits should be doable. My main challenge will be getting out of bed in time to do it!

Rambling thoughts I thought I'd put these in a separate post to the challenge goals, to save that post getting crowded with this stream of consciousness nonsense. I've put money against my challenges a few times, but I find that often falls through when I either drop out before the end of the challenge and forget to sort out the money, or I get to the end of the challenge and find that I don't actually have any money. This challenge starts on payday, conveniently, so I'm going to put my £100 straight into my saving account, and then anything that needs to be paid to my mortgage will be taken out of that reserved money. Exercise-wise I'm cutting down on my running mileage for now. I did have a goal to hit 1,202 miles by the end of the year, but that ship has most definitely sailed. So I've been thinking about my priorities, and I think that over the winter I want to focus primarily on strength gains, and then work on running technique/speed rather than running distance. It's all very well being able to run for hours at a time, but I'd quite like to be better at keeping up with people in the first place. At the same time, my strength in OCR is in completing the obstacles rather than catching people on runs, so I want to capitalise on that by being strong on the obstacles. Obstacle strength tends to be a mixture of being able to swing from my arms and climb shit, and being able to carry heavy things for long periods of time, which means bouldering and Crossfit focus should do well for me. There's also a bit of vanity when it comes to the workouts. I'm enjoying hitting some new PRs on my lifts, and I'm liking seeing the size of my muscles compared to a few years ago. I'm nearly the heaviest I've ever been, which is a bit of a conundrum, but I'm very much a different shape to what I was back then. I do need to lose a bit of body fat, but for now I want to focus on using that fat to fuel some strength gains rather than working on weight loss. I recognise that at some point I will need to focus on nutrition a bit more, but I don't have the mental energy to track food right now. I eat fairly well in terms of my main meals, and I know what I would need to work on is regulating snacks and alcohol a bit more, but honestly I can't be arsed right now. One thing at a time! If I manage to get my £100 out of this challenge, I'm not really sure what to spend the money on. I'm seriously considering the intuitive eating book, because that's something I'm pretty shit at. I should probably buy a yoga mat at some point too, and a set of gymnastic rings, and then give back the stuff I stole from my gym during lockdown. I'm sure I'll think of more stuff than I can afford over the next few weeks anyway. Challenge start on Monday (can't understand these Sunday starters ), but I may be back to chat some nonsense between now and then!

The £100 challenge Last challenge I did a very simple thing, which was just to try and check in every day. I managed just over half (about 59.5%), which is better than disappearing for 6 weeks. This time I want to still have a simple challenge, but one with some goals. So here's the plan: I'm going to wager £100 on myself this challenge, and I'm going to have 100 things to do. For every thing I do, I get a quid to spend what I want. For every thing I miss, a bob goes to paying off my mortgage. Simple as that. Goal 1 - workout 10 times per week I'm pretty good at hitting about 7 workouts per week, but I want to focus on getting all of the little bits that I've not been so good at. An ideal week might look something like this: M: Crossfit T: Running drills, hangboarding W: Crossfit T: 5k run, handboarding/handstands/vanity workout F: Crossfit S: Long run - 10 miles or 2 hours S: Bouldering, 5k run I don't have to follow that plan though - any 10 workouts in the week will do. It might mean I end up doing yoga or general stretching/recovery stuff in the evenings to make up some workouts, or I might end up doing some skill focussed work, it's all good stuff. 10 workouts per week, 5 week challenge, £50 up for grabs. Goal 2 - brush my teeth twice per day I don't know why I don't do this when it isn't a challenge goal, but I don't, so here it is. It's a habit I can hold for a while, but it never seems to last without some accountability. £1 per day, 7 days per week, 5 week challenge, £35 up for grabs. Goal 3 - draw 3 times per week Week 1 of this challenge is the last week of Inktober, so that should put me on to a reasonable start. I like drawing, it's a good way to occupy me, and I think it's good for my mental health. I'm not fantastically good at it, but that's really neither here nor there. I'm getting better, and very much enjoying the process. 3 drawing sessions per week, 5 week challenge, £15 up for grabs.

Well there wasn't a lot to this challenge, so there's not much to the wrap up! Final score is 25/42 (3/7, 6/7, 4/7, 6/7, 3/7, 3/7). Went ok in the middle, towards the end I spent quite a lot of time worrying about a Spartan race, and a bit of time recovering and having a short but busy week at work. Still, I'm glad I stuck around, even if I wasn't here as much as I could have been. Now to write the next chalenge!