Social Workout

Workout

On goals and a helpful push into a new level

About a year ago I set some fitness goals for myself. Consistency was the overall theme and improving my speed while climbing at Ride the Zone has been a daily focus. Marion has been pushing me over the past year to be able to hold a fast cadence while climbing long and steep hills. It is not easy, but the results are sweet.

Poet Laureate

Mr. Mohawk's Post V-Day "Get Your Sexy Back" Plan

Valentine’s Day represents the end of winter indulgence. For some of us, this means no more holiday-allotted time for sweets and champagne, and for the rest of us, that stupid capitalist holiday designed just for couples that forces us single people to dive face first into pints, either of ice cream or alcohol Valentine’s Day marks the decline of a season and reminds us it’s time to gear up for Spring Break. Here are my expert suggestions for getting ready for the warmer season:

Workout

sign me up

My husband and I decided to sign up for the Virginia Beach Shamrock Half Marathon - it will be my third, his first. I love the actual event but I also love having a goal, something to work toward. Because running can be boring in and of itself. My officialy training won't start until Christmas weekend, but I'm maintaining a base until then.

To do: a list

I was inspired by SandyLiz's mature, well-reasoned list of things to do that will make her life better and that she feels compelled to do without the promise of free yogurt or a personal training session.

And so I thought that with the Eat Sweat Blog thing over, I'd come up with one myself. And it looks a little something like this.

New York

Call for Feats

The Challenge is Over, Long Live the Challenge!

Last month, you banned beloved bagels from your diet, gave up popsicles, Splenda, and grilled cheese. It was wild and healthy. And yet, the situation remains precarious. We're now in challenge-less limbo, facing the most dangerous season of all, a prolonged time of feast and cocktail, inertia, and early darkness. It would be so easy to slip into a several month long Starlene Kine-style DVD television marathon; AND YET, patience and energy are never more important than they are at the family Thanksgiving. Ditto for the gantlet of holiday schmoozefests. Keeping mind and body together in this time will take work, however. Self Discipline! Community support! What's urgently needed, of course, is a challenge. But it must be a particular kind of challenge, one that anticipates our lack of time, and that acknowledges a certain amount of indulgence and excess. It must be a challenge with a sense of humor, and yet also a firm bottom line. We've been tinkering away.

After the jump, please find a list of proposed holiday season feats of extreme wellness. You'll see that we're pushing into uncharted fitness territory here, but that the list is unfinished. As we created feats, it became obvious that we needed to tap Social Workout's collective intelligence. These sort of feats come from strokes of genius, and, frankly, they're a pleasure to invent. So, from now until November 11th, we're officially collecting feat submissions. When the dust settles, we will select the top 20 most brilliant proposed feats and package them into Social Workout's first annual...

Emergency Holiday Body Challenge

The E.H.B.C. will begin on November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, and run to December 31st. At which point, needless to say, we'll be ready and waiting with something mega for the new year. But first, we need to make it to 2010 with our sanity and with some semblance of physical integrity. And so....