(Announcement) Fitness Challenge from Maggie Shayne

There are challenges going on all summer, with prizes, over on Maggie's Health and Fitness email list. This next one begins Monday July 7th. If you want to join in, send a blank email to Maggies-health-and-fitness-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Details below!
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I got this idea from a challenge the Onondaga County Parks Department is doing this month.

The challenge is to exercise for 30 minutes a day, every day, for 30 days.
30-for-30.

So here's what you need to do. Get yourself a calendar or use one you already have. And begin on Monday writing down what you do, and how long you do it.

Now this includes brisk walks, swimming, biking, aerobics, weights, yoga, martial arts, running, jumping on a trampoline, and anything else you can think of. I'd really like us to mix it up and see how many activities we can include in our thirty day marathon.

We'll stay on our weight loss/diet plans, of course. We'll keep weighing in and checking our weight, and sharing that if we want, naturally. And this is going to be tough for me, because it will end AFTER the RWA convention in SF. So I'll have to use a hotel gym for that final week! Yikes!

We'll keep track of everyone who completes the challenge. (Or if no one does, we'll keep track of who managed to get the MOST days in.) And we'll put those names in a hat and draw one to win the grand prize!

The Grand Prize--it's fabulous! It's a full set of 4 workout DVDs from Beachbody.com, Debbie Siebers' SLIM EXPRESS. It includes Cardio Core Express, Cardio Sculpt Express, Cool it Off!, and 6-Minute Abs. It's close to a fifty dollar value with shipping. And appropriately enough, each workout, takes 30 minutes.

I actually just bought this set, thinking I didn't have it yet, but it turned out, I actually had already bought it. It was stored with most of my other belongings, at the cleanup crew's place. They brought my DVDs back last week, and then this arrived like the next day! It's still wrapped, brand new.

So we begin on Monday.

Also, I'm going to try to post daily "tips" that we can each try to incorporate into our daily lives to help boost our progress.

Monday we begin.
Our final day, day 30, will be Tuesday, August 5th.
We'll tally the results and pick a winner on Wednesday August 6th.

Better rest up today. Or gear up! Enjoy your Sunday and congrats on a job well done on our previous challenge!

Maggie

Re-Entry (LynnK)

After nearly three months in a world not my own, I seem to be returning to earth. I’m hoping so, anyway. And like the space capsules I’m old enough to remember, I landed in the water.

Since early March, I’ve scarcely gone anywhere or done anything. Singing wasn’t painful, so I managed to rehearse and perform in a concert last Saturday night. Once a week, I staggered out for groceries and other essential errands. Otherwise, I had all the mobility of a cave drawing.

Until Monday, when I wrestled my too, too solid flesh into a bathing suit and dragged myself to water aerobics. The long stretch of virtual immobility (not much room to move in a 500-sq-ft apartment) had packed on at least fifteen pounds, and unlike my skin, my clothes won’t stretch to accommodate them. I needed exercise. Baaaad.

Krissie, another fan of water aerobics, can testify to the benefits. Even a body in pain can move freely and without undue stress in the water. But she lives a long distance from the nearest pool, and the winter in Vermont is frigid. I have no such problem, the heated pool being a mile away and winter temperatures plunging to, oh, the high 50's. Even so, I can’t bear what is, for me, the intolerable cold of a Coronado winter. I hadn’t done aerobics since October.

Nearly all the Aqua-Naughties were there, ostensibly glad to see me again, and there was lots of joking around. I did more moving in one hour than I’d done in months. Muscles that must have thought themselves retired for life were suddenly performing frog leaps, cross-country, pendulums, roly-polies, and sinkers.

On Tuesday, I started paying the price for my exertions. Every part of my body was protesting the pain. Who knew hair could hurt?! But Wednesday I went back, and yesterday I hurt even more.

Nonetheless, I’ll be there again tonight. This pain, unlike the agony produced by the damnable Shingles, is productive. And I’m weary of being the helpless victim of a mean-spirited virus. Outa my way, herpes zoster. I have things to do.

I’m also feeling miserably self-absorbed, which I detest. So many of my friends are dealing with serious problems involving the people they most love–husbands, children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters and parents–where I have only my own pain to grieve about. Not that I haven’t been through the other, excepting offspring, of which I have none. Now I have only a cat, who is doing just fine.

But resentful, from time to time, whenever I clip his claws or clean his ears. Not because of those things, though. He mourns, without exactly being aware of it, the loss of the treat that always used to follow these assaults on his person.

Anyssinians have a tendency to develop gingivitis, and to help combat it, I rewarded him (directly after claw-clipping, etc.) with what looked something like a small rawhide chew stick given to dogs. These ones taste like chicken–I’m taking the package’s word for that–and are fully digestible. The cat liked them a lot. After demolishing one, he’d stretch out like a pasha and give his ragged claws a manicure.


So naturally, about three years ago, the pet stores stopped carrying the chewies. I tried every place in town, pretty much. There was a similar product, someone told me, that I could order on-line. But by the time they added enormous shipping and handling charges, a package cost three times its regular price. I do supply premium cat food, Petromalt, teeth-brushing, and the like, but I couldn’t bring myself to pay extortion rates for pig-in-a-poke chewies.

This only became an issue once a month, when the cat permitted me to groom him and then waited with a hopeful expression for his reward. My explanations cut no mustard with him. He’d proceed to the kitchen cabinet where the treasure had formerly been stored and sit there looking from it to me. Me to it. It to me.

Then he'd go to his favorite perch and fix his gaze on me with the unmistakable message of an aggrieved Abycat:

"Ah, Lynn, you are a great disappointment to me.”

Eventually, in the way of cats, he forgot. And so it went for a couple of years, with him enduring the indignities of claw-clipping and ear-cleaning without any reward except petting, of which he gets plenty anyway.

Then . . . a miracle. Yesterday I ventured out for long-postponed errands, moving with all the grace of Robbie the Robot, and at Petco, I found NuBone chewy thingies! Not the same brand or appearance, but they seem designed for the same purposes.

Will the cat like them? Give me a look of tolerant approval? I dunno. They’re still in the car, which I had to park a long way away. By the time I hauled in the perishables, I was knackered.

He senses something, though. The vibration of impending treats has perked up his ears. He’s fixing me with one of his “get-to-it” looks. Something wonderful this way comes.

And I’m having the same experience. Slowly but steadily, I’m starting to feel better. I have a fun trip in July to look forward to. If not for the (semi)-rigorous dieting and exercise between now and then, I might be positively cheerful.

Really, I ought to fulfill ineffable cat-longings by going out into the night and retrieving chewies from the car. And I would, if I had the vaguest notion where it was parked.

The spirit is willing, the body is semi-functional, but the mind is still lost in space.