The Challenge

This, as you can see, is the first post in my blog. It is in this blog that I plan to keep track of my workouts, nutrition, and overall progress in working towards the upcoming challenge. What is this challenge? A little background...

Matt and I were roommates for about a year, from august '05 to august '06. At the beginning of that year, both of us were in pretty terrible shape. We both experimented with various workout routines and plans, including weightlifting and bodyweight endurance workouts. Each time we'd try a new plan, we recognized the deficiencies in our previous fitness plan. Finally, we came across www.crossfit.com. It seemed that crossfit incorporated the best aspects of the workouts we had been doing before, into one system. After a few months of doing crossfit consistently, I can say that I was in the best physical condition I had ever been in. I could do everything harder, stronger, and faster than I had been able to do before. I'm not saying there wasnt room for improvement, but I had reached a new level of fitness.

This during the summer this past year. I managed to injure my neck, which made many exercises difficult to do, other things got in the way, and I stopped making time for exercising like I used to. Matt graduated and moved out, and I no longer had someone pusing me to get out there. Eventually, I wasnt exercising at all. In the past few weeks to a month, I've started workout out again, trying to get back into my old routine. Yet it's not quite the same when you don't have someone doing the same workout as you. I've found that the competitive edge if a huge factor (for me at least) in performing well, especially in a program like crossfit.

Matt still lives about an hour away, and neither of us have transportation. I can't find anyone in the area who would be a reliable workout partner, and who would want to do crossfit 5-6 days a week. After a recent phone conversation, Matt and I came up with the idea of a fitness challenge. For me, this challenge is an answer to the problems I just mentioned. It's something to motivate me, to push my level of fitness to something even higher than it's been before. We havent worked out out all the rules but the basic premise is simple. Every month or two, we meet up, and perform some sort of workout together. This workout will probably be known to both of us in advance. It will test all of the different aspects of fitness, as laid out by crossfit. The workout will be long, and hard, to say the least. Whoever does it faster, with more reps, more weight, or whatever the workout calls for, is the winner. Set up another workout, different from the last, meet up again in a month or so, repeat.

Enough typing, time to exercise. Here's the plan for today:

-1 mile run

-3 rounds for time:
400M run
21 KB swings
12 Pull-ups

I'll let you know how it turns out.