I have sucked at staying accountable in my My Peak Challenge endevaours. Here on the blog as much as anywhere else. Like how I dropped out of the Peakstreak Idea of writing a certain amount of words or for a certain amount of time in January. I just stopped doing it and never mentioned it again here. Like I said, I SUCK at staying accountable. Maybe I should make that one of my challenges for 2018 :-).
Yes, I’ve signed up for My Peak Challenge again, accountabilty or not. I didn’t follow the program to the T and I lost track a lot of times, but it did change my life in some ways and I want to keep at it. Working out. Being more active. Maybe follow up on some more of my self-choseen challenges again. I should start with writing about how I fared with last year’s challenges, before I think of new challenges, because I haven’t really spend too much time on those yet.
#1 Lose at least 25 pounds
I lost some weight pretty quickly, once I followed the workout routine and cut some of the unhealthy food from my life. I didn’t and still don’t follow the meal plan though as that seems too much trouble for me still. Right now I’m about minus 18 pounds, which is allright. I stayed around that weight even when I stopped working out all that regularily. I plan to lose at least 10 – 15 pounds more this year, but I’m not sure I’ll actually make that a challenge.
#2 Get at least 300 km of cycling done this summer
Yeah, that didn’t go as planned. At all. I have the bike in my kitchen and it should be easy to take it out for a spin. But it was either lack of time or the bad weather that kept me from doing so. I only did one short ride all summer long to be honest. And then during the summer I picked up running as exercise, which is so much easier to do (and gets me in a sweat much quicker than cycling), so I put cycling on a back burner.
#3 Bag my first Munro
Check! I’m really really glad I did this. And I’m still kind of proud of me for that to be honest.
#4 Meditate daily
That was harder that I thought. I had some weeks where I did – always using the wonderful Calm App on my phone – and some where I just couldn’t be bothered. Often enough I did a quick 2-3 minutes session late at night, to have it accounted for in the app. I’m on a 47 day streak at the moment (yes, with the occassional late night quicky, thrown in), so that’s not too bad. I will definitely try to keep this up.
#5 Finally start writing that novel
Big fat fail! And probably the one I regret the most. It’s the same as it was with the Peakstreak in January. I get distracted and spend my time procrastinating with TV and books to read and Twitter and such. It obviously was the biggest challenge and one I definetly should put on my challenge 2018 list again. In some way anyway.
So, on first glance it might look like I’ve failed quite a bit or only half suceeded in my first year of really participating in MPC. But even though I didn’t follow through with all my challenges, I’m very glad I did stay part of the program till the end. Especially with the workout routine it often felt like 1 step forward – 2 steps back, and I wasn’t consistent till the end. But compared to the couch potato life I led before, that has still been a huge step forward. I didn’t completely give up half way through, which is a huge deal for me. The even bigger deal is that I kind of look forward to starting with a real workout again.. The program officially started again on Monday, but I spent this week on vacation and didn’t have the time to checkout the new workouts yet, so that will take a few more days and I hope to start with it all by the end of next week. With new challenges and all.
If you follow me on Twitter and Instagram you might have seen tweets and posts about a MPC weekend and events in Glasgow, Scotland last September. I never got around to write a bit about that (go figure!) and I at least wanted to that for a bit in this recap post. The MPC weekend was an event for about 500 lucky (as in able to score tickets) Peakers. We all gathered in Glasgow for the weeknd, there were organized hikes on Saturday and on Sunday we all did a workout session at headcoach John’s gym together (in 1h shifts, which turned the gym into a crazy hive of activity, but it was so much fun). The weekend ended with a wonderful, amazing gala for all of us on Sunday evening. Yes, Sam showed his face at the gym at some point and of course at the gala and that was very lovely. But what made the whole weekend so special to me was the cameraderie and instant rapport among us 500 ladies (and the few gents) who had invaded Glasgow for that weekend. Besides the official acitivies we had used a seperate Facebook group to make plans for Afternoon Tea or group dinners and it was just amazing how wonderful all these tiny little side events turned out. I met some lovely people and we had a blast, chatting about MPC and Outlander of course, but also about so many other things.
Personally my biggest challenge / achievement on this weekend might have been to be a bit more outgoing. I made myself send out request to the group like “I’m staying on this road and plan to have grab a bite / have a drink somewhere, who would like to join me?” or “I’ve got the 1 PM workout, who would like to share a taxi to the gym?” and every freaking time some lovely lady would reply “cool, let’s do that” and I went out and met or shared a taxi with some stranger and I had the best of times.
There will be a similar event this fall (?) and I already know I won’t be able to make it this time and that makes me a bit sad. But I will always cherish the wonderful memories I made there last year! Have a look at this and you might understand why…
MPC2018 from My Peak Challenge on Vimeo.