The motivation behind getting the Beachbody community involved (click here) in my birthday challenge is pretty simple. Most people let their fitness and health slide as we enter the holiday season. And while this tends to make for exciting New Years Resolutions, we think it’s easier to stay fit if you don’t fall completely off the wagon, so we’re offering up a little challenge as incentive to keep you going during the slack season.
Personally, I’m not one who has issues this time of year. With a late November birthday and a penchant for challenges on that day, I tend to roll into the holidays actually needing a break in order to keep my fitness as high as possible. This year, what’s mine is yours, and if you follow along and participate not only can you win stuff but you’ll be fit enough to coast through the holidays in perfect timing to start your best New Year’s challenge yet.
So, how do you do it?
It’s pretty easy, basically. You just follow along during the week and do something creative each weekend. My weekday schedule is manageable but you don’t need to do what I do. The best thing about birthday challenges is that they’re personal. What I’m doing is just an example to inspire you to do something similar with the ultimate aim to make yourself (and/or other around you) better. Your challenge should be what you can manage if it goes perfectly, and perhaps just miss if you don’t. And we’ll be around to keep the third option, quitting, as minimal as possible.
Then, each weekend, you give yourself something to do that’s just a little out of your comfort zone. Again, you have my example to look at but I’ve been doing these for a long time, so if it seems crazy keep that in mind. The only rule is that it should be something that interests you to try that you think you might be able to do but aren’t quite sure. Don’t worry about failure. The real gold is this challenge is the effort.
Reed’s Challenge
We’ll use my buddy Reed Bartlett’s challenge as an example. An accomplished athlete in the past, life has kept him too busy to get out much these days, so he used the number of his birthday, 47, to make a creative list of stuff he’d like to do.
If you noticed my list, its 53 things plus weekend challenges. Yours does not need to be so in depth. Reed’s list stopped at one: climb 47 different rock climbs. One is perfect.
This is a very hard day, especially given he hadn’t done 47 pitches total in probably that last four years combined. There was a time when it would have been a snap (he once did over 200 boulder problems in half a day), so he knew it was, maybe, possible.
When Bob and I signed on for support he added two more events to round out a weekend. The first, a ridge traverse over at least 4.7 peaks and 4.7 miles with 4,700’ of elevation change and a recovery ride with at least 4.7 stunts. I’ll let Reed summarize how it went.
Had a great weekend. Thanks Bob and Steve for coming out and helping me suffer. Sitting here my tips are sore, my left palm is sore for some reason, my thighs are killing me, I have a strange bruise on my butt and my back is sunburned. That probably means I need another beer.
heading up peak #3 with #1 & #2 in the background
We did a killer run/hike that was supposed to go from the North Side of Bell Mountain, over Bell Mountain and then along two different little ranges on their ridges before the last mile or two to my house.
unfortunately headlamps are always in the car
We didn’t quite have enough light, so we had to descend early and walked home, but it was awesome.
route #29
But my thighs were worked from the downhill running and have been sore since. Saturday we did 47 pitches, with most of them at the Cemetery and 10 more at the Lucerne Limestone, which involved lots of jessery and shenanigans.
“jessery and shenanigans”
number 42
Today we did an easy Hippie Bike ride at Sycamore rocks before everyone headed out. I’m tired, but it’s a very good tired.
easy is relative. your challenge should be about you.
I am totally going to try this.
Go Steve! I can’t wait to read about your challenges!
Wow, comments are working! It’s been a long time. Who woulda thunk it?
Awesome!