its all a hill from here

I haven’t posted a “Holiday Challenge” update in awhile, actually, I haven’t posted anything at all in awhile.  I haven’t been hiding, but I have been busy.  In fact, I’ve been relatively active on the twitter and the facebook and even the flickr – just not on the wordpress blog.   Hopefully, magic lifestream code will help consolidate these online ramblings at a future date when I have a more comfortable working environment at home (re: I need a new desk chair, very very badly and hate to spend a lot of time at my desk right now because my chair is so bad).  But alas, I digress.

I’ve fallen behind on the rowing meters somewhat lately since we’ve started our winter spinning ritual at Mike’s place, which doesn’t leave time for rowing on those days.  With only today and tomorrow left in the challenge, my plan was to row this morning, tonight, tomorrow morning and tomorrow evening to make up the ~27k that I had remaining when I last checked my log.

My goal was to get up by 6:15 this morning and hit the machine by 6:30.  Nick was going to help by kicking the bed at 6:15 to make sure I got up, since he’s usually out of bed by 6:00.  Figures that today was the day that we both slept in until 6:45 when I finally noticed the time and jumped out of bed.

So, I stumbled down to the rower and got started.  While I was rowing, I started to do some math to figure out how much I needed to row for each of the 4 rows I had left to do in order to make my goal.  The more I rowed, the more I thought that I had only completed ~163k meters, and that I actually had ~37 k left to row, not the ~27k that I’d had in my mind.  I’ve been known to be bad at math and figured I’d just miscalculated when I looked at my log last.  I suddenly wanted to cry.  I didn’t have enough time to row for an hour, and I was so tired that 30 minutes was seeming torturous as well.  But I figured I’d do what I could in the time that I had and managed to squeek out just over 9k in a little more than 45 minutes.

And then I went to my computer to input my distance, and discovered that I was freaking out over nothing.  Before this morning’s row, I had completed just over 173k meters.  Therefore, adding my 9k, I’m left with a nice, reasonable 18k to meet my goal.  50 minutes tonight + 50 minutes tomorrow, and I’ve exceeded my goal.  THIS is totally doable.  THIS feels really really good.

This has been a really awesome experience for me and I hope to contiue rowing after this challenge.  I hope to find something to motivate me to the type of dedication I had for this challenge, and I’m thinking that motivation will come from how good I look and feel right now.  I don’t know if I lost much more than 5lbs over the past month, but I’ve toned up a lot, I feel strong and sexy and I didn’t change a single thing about how I eat (I still am very concious of the choices I make, and some aren’t always good, but I never eat anything without considering what I’m eating).

I’ve proven that I can fit a full hour (or more) of exercise into every single day.  I’ve proven that I can exercise 6 days straight without feeling burnt out.  I’ve proven that excercising for 45min-1hr every day will allow me to loose weight without seriously limiting my food intake.  Its a slower loss for a lot of reasons, but I prefer to do it this way.  I know that over time, the more I fit exercise into my daily routine, the better my food choices will be – but for me, I think it’ll be easier to increase the exercise than it will be to significantly change my diet.

On that note, wish me luck on my final 18k!