30-Day Challenge: Halfway

Two weeks ago, I decided I needed more accountability in my life, so I embarked upon a 30-day challenge. My goal was to do at least 30 minutes of “non-normal life required” exercise per day. Unfortunately I’ve gone far too long with counting my nearly unavoidable walk to the train station and back every day as “exercise,” which it is quite clearly is not because I can’t very well fly there. 

So… how’s it going? Well….

Via

I wish I was the kind of person who popped out of bed at 6am like a piece of crispy toast.

No I don’t.

I do however, wish I was the kind of person who didn’t have a severe complex about anyone seeing me exercise. I wrote a bit about this weird phobia of mine last summer when I was trying to start working out, but as it turns out… it’s much worse than I thought.

How much worse? 

Well, now that I have another person in my house 9 out of 10 nights, it has reared its ugly head. All went fine the first few days of the challenge which fell during the week. I was easily able to get my trusty 40-minute Pilates video in while I was home alone. But then the weekend rolled around. I told BV he was welcome to do it with me, which we had actually done a few weeks before, with a fair amount of giggling on my part… basically picture a daddy long legs trying to do the warrior pose. I thought he could benefit from some stretching… plus I was curious if he really couldn’t sit cross-legged, as he claims. I insisted on standing behind him, and between our positions in the room and my amusement, it worked out pretty well. 

So on the first Saturday of the challenge (day 4), I told him he was more than welcome to do the video with me. Otherwise he wasn’t allowed to be in the room. Problem with this? Yeah… remember that midget-sized apartment I House Hunters International-ed with? Still live there. He wasn’t in the mood to stretch his legs, and after a spirited discussion he decided to start showering while I started the video. 

Twenty minutes later he tried to come back in the living room, because for some strange and unknown reason, he didn’t feel like hanging out in the bathroom for another twenty minutes post-shower. I was not particularly pleased about being interrupted, and tried to kick him out. Reasonable, right? Yeah, not so much. He wanted to read his university stuff in the living room, but I wasn’t having any possibility of him looking at me. I’m flattering myself, I know. After a slightly more “spirited” discussion in which I tried to get him to sit the wrong way on the bed facing the corner (and with an additional warning to not turn around), I got really pissed and gave up. That was the end of that for the day. We compromised the rest of the weekend with beer-free Wii, and some walks around town.

I realize that this whole thing was ridiculous. I know.

Luckily though I’ve only run into that problem in the first weekend. This past weekend I had the house to myself, so no issue there. I guess we see how it goes on Saturday morning this week… 

However, I’m happy to report that besides that hiccup, the whole thing has gone reasonably well. I haven’t pushed anything too far yet, but that’s in the plan. A few days I had to just claim walking as my “exercise,” and one of those days involved a walk to and from the Volksfest to drink beer and eat pretzels, but I’m still counting it. To be fair, the tram to the fest stops a block from my apartment, so we really did take the more health-conscious way to get there. So I’m counting it.*

My plan for the second half of this challenge is to add in the old Boot Camp video, and maybe some other options. I have to peruse the exercise video options on Hulu and see if anything appeals. But I’d like to kick it up a notch. I thought I caught a hint of muscle today, but it might just have been stomach flub redistributing itself. Hard to say. So… let’s see how it goes!

*Do you hear that? That’s the sound of stretching.