The 30 Day Challenge

First up, its not going too well. I mean, I am trying to stay sorted on it, but its been tough because, well, read on. You don't even know what the challenge is, right? Right.

I was traipsing along on a bunch of exercise-freak blogs. I could be one of those people, truthfully. I mean, we both could be that. A family of exercise freaks, we could be. But reality is, we are not. Not so much.

So when I first read it, I was laughing. So this person is talking about a year long challenge. Push up challenge. Jan 1st you do ONE (measly) push up. Come Dec 31, you are talking about 365 of those suckers. And if you happen to miss Dec 30 because you were traveling or sick or whatever, you have to do hmmm.. 729 on Dec 31. Get it?

I told a bunch of my friends about it. They laughed at me. I mean, come on, who wouldn't? 365 push ups? Thats fucking insane, isn't it?

So, for myself, I pruned the challenge to a '30 day' thingie. So January is Push Ups month. On Jan 30th, my aim is to be able to do 30 continuous push ups. Yes, not the girl push ups. The real ones, at least to the best of my ability. I could do 10-12 already, having built that up in 2010, inspired by someone I know. I could do 50 in sets of 4-5 earlier on when I was kick boxing. So I figured this is not a BIG DEAL challenge, just a normal one. More to do with discipline than anything else.

A friend of mine has more ideas on it, he is doing a push up, pull up, crunches challenge for Jan. I plan to do a different challenge each month this year. Depending on how this one goes.. There are plenty of avenues for development in my case, for sure, so yeah, it could be fun. No pull ups though, I don't think I can even do one of them, unsupported.

Now, this is the problem. I have strained my left shoulder. Its been more than a month now. Its not a lot of pain, but just a sort of nagging thing. It makes for most uncomfortable sleep and I have been waking up a lot less rested than otherwise. But its not a big enough deal for me to do anything about it. In fact, I ran the Mumbai Half with that nasty shoulder thing, and it was okay, was not particularly reminded of it. But of course when I am doing push ups I am strongly reminded of this pain in my shoulder. I can deal with pain, not too much of a wus that way. Nevertheless, there are days when I cannot complete my quota because of the combination of real pain in the shoulder and the mind telling me its foolish to do this with the pain.

The pain was there BEFORE I launched the challenge, its been around more than a month now. So its not BECAUSE of it. But it sure as hell messes me up. Of course I am a crazy girl so I am forging ahead anyhow hoping that it will somehow go away by changing my pillow or something like that...

Status as of now? I have had some good days. Today I did my quota of 21. Yesterday, I couldn't. I did not compensate for yesterday. Nope. On Marathon day, therefore, I got down and did my 16 before heading off for the race. Knowing that I wouldn't have enthu after the run. But there have been 1-2 other days when without even a half marathon to run, I have ditched. So, not terrific overall.....

Want to try it? You can pick what you want to do - Girl push ups, Ab crunches, x seconds of Plank, any other stuff you find on youtube - it could be anything. I think the increase of 1 per day is very good (it works!), and handle-able, and despite my not so great performance, I have had a good amount of fun with it....