My Journey With Health And Fitness – I Did It!

A memory popped up on FB from 8 years ago, my Mom’s 80th birthday party. It was a picture of all the family that attended. It is a special picture because we would lose Mom 4 months later. But looking at that picture I realized in the past 8 years we have lost 4 of those family members, Mom, her brother, a cousin and my beloved aunt who passed away this year. I’ve decided I’m just going to think of the happy time we had that day, the last full gathering of the family.

Today is June 1st and I am proud to announce that I met my commitment to Workout To Conquer Cancer. Yes, at least 30 minutes of working out every day during the month of May. The end result was instead of 930 minutes, I did 3,500. Ok, yesterday I realized after my hour walk then an hour of bootcamp that I was only 20 minutes short of hitting 3,500 minutes so of course went out for a walk. Problem was it was unbelievably hot and humid so by time I was done I was absolutely soaked with sweat.

This is the 3rd challenge I have done this year. I started with Dry February to raise funds for the BC Cancer Foundation (ok, I started late but still 4 weeks with no alcohol). I then moved on to Climb The Wall, climbing 48 stories to raise money for the BC Lung Foundation. Now I have done the Workout To Conquer Cancer to again raise funds for the BC Cancer Foundation. All of these I have successfully completed and have hit up pretty much all of my friends to raise money (note, I try to only hit my friends up once a year so I rotate through them for each fundraiser).

But why do I do this? I do it because it keeps me accountable. By that I mean if I am asking people to donate I have to follow through with the challenge. So, not once did I have alcohol during my Dry February 4 weeks. I trained every day for a month leading up to the Climb The Wall day. And I have not missed a single day of working out during May (note I actually have not missed a day since we arrived and only have 8 more days here and plan to a workout on each of those days). As a matter of fact, during this last challenge I asked people not to ‘buy’ me a day off which was actually an option because I know I would use that as an excuse. I like that these events as they force me to stay on track because it helps motivate me when those voices in my head tell me to take a break.

And so I will keep finding these events. I actually saw one for June where you have to cycle at least 200km and I am considering doing that even though I am not a big biking fan. However, I think it is just the challenge I need to shake things up a bit. I’ll keep you posted on whether I do it or not.