Yet another challenge

Throughout the past few years I've set myself up to a few challenges, sensible or not. These challenges, almost all related to exercise, were of varied degrees, realistic goals or even with a fair timeframe. There was the I'm going to start biking to work, no matter the weather - a challenge that worked out pretty good and lasted much longer than I expected. Three months later there was the I'm going to bike to the summer house work trip and back and shortly after that the I'm going to participate in the 60 km Blue Lagoon mountain bike race. All of these within the first 6 months of starting exercising on a regular basis again. I managed all of them with varying success of course. But I finished. The following two years brought on a 10 km run, another Blue Lagoon challenge, biking between two glaciers and biking the most popular hiking trail in Iceland. All finished.
And now, I've challenged a colleague to a fitness feat. This time around, it is the 100 day burpees challenge. In this, we aim to do a 100 burpees within 20 minutes on the 100th day of the challenge. In the days leading up to it we start by doing one burpee, adding one every day after that until we reach those 100. What is a burpee you ask? Well, a burpee is a full body exercise that tests both strength and aerobic ability. To perform, you start in a standing position (as per above photo), squat down and put the hands on the ground in front of you, kick the feet back to the starting position of a push up, lower your chest as you would in a normal push up, up again, kick your feet forward and then finally jump as high up as possible. Then repeat. 99 times. In 20 minutes.
This challenge is quite popular these days in the CrossFit scenery but has also been used extensively in marine training from what I can gather. There actually several very good exercises that follow a similar philosophy in CrossFit but most are of a similar degree, i.e. murderously hard!
We started on the 21st of February and so today was day 14. Now, 14 burpees might not sound like a lot, but believe me, I'm starting to feel them.
Wish me luck... I'll need it.

Labels: day2day, english, exercise, Jeddah, Saudi-Arabia

as written by Tobbi G. at 11:06 AM GMT