In the interest of accountability I’m going share my 30 Day challenge results. I must admit, it feels a little silly that doing something consistently for a mere 30 days should be a substantial accomplishment. Yet here I am at the end of it and the fact is that I only mostly succeeded.
I’d love to blame missing the target on all sorts of external factors but in the end I chose everything I did each day and if those choices didn’t include building in the time to do what I set out to do then do I really have anything outside of me to point to as the problem?
Final results then:
- Achieved 87% of the target number of days
- Achieved 150% of the total time-exercising goal
I should point out that if I did some other vigorous exercise, namely skiing, I accepted that as time. For alpine skiing I took a discount on the time and for cross country I took the full time.
So the big win is that I really wasn’t doing any regular exercise for the last few months. Setting the goal got me to exercise for more than 900 minutes, about 15 hours, over the 30 days (its actually 150% of the time goal but I’m discounting a bit here and there).
Obviously I’m not breaking any records with this… but that’s not really the point.
The point is rebuilding good habits. So, to that end, I realize there are a few things I did not do well that I’m going to improve upon for the next challenge.
The #1 thing I think I could have done to have more success would be to do the exercise every single day at the exact same time in the exact same way, in the morning, before I did anything else. If I let the morning get too far away from me then the next thing I found was that life sought to sabotage my plans – kids, meals, appointments…
So, in the interest of better results the next 30 day challenge, the substance of which is yet to be determined, needs to have specific patterns and a schedule associated with it. I’m pretty sure that’s what habits are…
And yet as I sit here dog tired on a Saturday, after having been woken by at least two children, 1 sick, no less than 3 times for the last 4 or 5 nights, I consider how this could justify that maybe I should just skip the workout I have planned for today… Had I woken up and done it immediately of course there would be no debate.
