Monthly Challenge Check-In (or Doing My Own Version Of An OTF Challenge This Month)

It’s time for me to end one monthly challenge and start another one! I’ll admit that last month’s challenge didn’t go the way I expected it to go at all, but I’m really excited about this month’s challenge.

Last month, I challenged myself to work on daily stretching. I knew I need to work on doing more stretching because my flexibility was getting worse lately. Also, I’m stuck sitting at a computer for so many hours a day and I need to make sure that doing that doesn’t start to affect my body. And there are so many different resources out there to help get more stretching into your life. So I figured this would be the perfect challenge for me.

Well, it really wasn’t. At least not in the way I really hoped it would. I had looked at several different guided stretching apps and picked out the one that seemed best for me and had the stretches I would want to work on. And I did that for the first few days of the month and it just wasn’t working for me. Some of the stretches were hurting me more than I thought and the flow of it just seemed off. There was nothing wrong with the app, it just wasn’t for me.

I tried looking at a few other apps and other guides online, but I never found anything else during the month that seemed to be what I needed or wanted. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t work on stretching all month. I did work on it, but I never found a good practice for me that I could keep going. I haven’t given up yet, but it’s something that I haven’t been able to successfully build into a habit that I have been able to do with so many other monthly challenges.

After having a not-so-great challenge last month, I wanted to do something that I was excited about this month. At Orangetheory, they are doing a marathon challenge for the month of April. The basic idea is to track your mileage during all your classes in the month and there are different distances you can try to get based on if you are a power walker, jogger, runner, biker, or strider.

I thought about doing this challenge officially through Orangetheory but realized that it probably wouldn’t be right for me. It should have been fine going to different studios since we are responsible for tracking our own mileage. But since I know that when I’m nauseous I don’t want to be walking on the treadmill I would be split between the power walker and bike marathon challenges and might not be able to accomplish either on its own. Also, I’m thinking about trying to do some minimal running again if my body feels up for it so I didn’t know how that would affect doing the power walker (13.1 miles) challenge.

So I’ve decided for my monthly challenge this month I will be doing my own marathon challenge and tracking. One of my blogger friends, David, does this every month on his blog so I’m kind of taking the idea from him too. I have no clue if I will get to 13.1 miles power walking and I’m pretty certain that I won’t be at 105 miles on the bike unless I only do the bike the entire month (which I am not planning on doing). But it will be interesting to see how many miles I do accomplish between the treadmill and bike this month.

I’ve set up my Ink+Volt monthly calendar for this month with tracking stickers. I put stickers for each day that I’m planning on working out so I can fill in what distance I get in class.

I’m going to be taking photos of the treadmill and bike during each class so I have it to fill in later. The only time I’m a little concerned is if we have a run/row day since I will need to remember to take a photo every time I switch over to the rower. But I think that should be easy enough to do and the worst case would be needing to ask the coach after class if I could look at the workout plan so I could see what distances I was supposed to do during the run/row to figure out how many rounds I did. But that’s not that bad of a worse case scenario.

I think this is going to be a fun challenge for me. I really don’t know how many miles I’ll get. I have an idea of what I can do based on past workouts and how many workouts I have this month, but I don’t know how many days will get up being bike days. And there are always other factors that come in to make my distances on the treadmill longer or shorter. No matter what, it will be interesting to see what the totals are at the end of the month.

While it would have been fun to do this officially at the studios I go to, I think doing it on my own is a good substitute considering my circumstances. And maybe this will help me stay more motivated when I’m on the bike because I will want to be getting as much distance as possible to make sure my total at the end of the month is impressive!

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Mileage And Motivation (or Another New Challenge) Not Perfect This Month (or Challenged With The Monthly Challenge) Failing And Succeeding In One Monthly Challenge (or Another Repeat Challenge This Month) Taking A Month To Reset (or This Doesn’t Really Feel Like A Monthly Challenge) I Feel Like Every Monthly Challenge Is The Same (or Will This Be The Month I Get Back On Track?) Getting Back To Stretching (or My Body Is Telling Me What Monthly Challenge To Do)