my 8 week challenge

Tomorrow will be the official eight-week start of my challenge and eight weeks until my vacation. Even though I don’t have the website setup completely yet and haven’t met with my mobile personal trainer or done any physical assessment, I figure why not start doing something today?

I love to run. On my personal site I have a page dedicated to my runs. I’ll admit, it hasn’t been updated in a long time. Last year I set a goal to run my first full marathon. A full 26.2 miles. I completed the 2009 Honolulu Marathon in 4:44. It was slower than I’d hoped for initially, but I use the crazy Calgary weather as my excuse for my lack of training in the month of December.

This past June 20 I ran a half marathon in the Manitoba Marathon in Winnipeg — a race that I first ran in 1991. In fact I first ran in the Super Run, a quick 2.6 miles, back in 1987. As you can see, I’ve been running for a while. I’ve also not run for a long period of time during the last 23 years since that first race.

One of my goals is to do something physical everyday. Honestly, to sweat every day. Yes I know that’s part of the lululemon manifesto, but I think it works, so I plan to do it. Today I pulled on the running shoes for the first time in almost two-weeks — which was over a month since my half marathon run. The weather wasn’t so great so I hit the dreaded treadmill. I say dreaded as I’d rather run outdoors even in snow and cold — I just wasn’t prepared properly.

It was a quick run; literally. I ran for fifteen minutes cover 1.5 miles — roughly a 10:00/mi pace. That’s slow for me and a very short distance. I figure doing this during the middle of the work day though is still a good fifteen minutes that most people don’t take and even the little bit will help me out.

My day zero is in the books and I definitely did sweat. Like the title of this post says, why not start today? What have you put off, even if only for a day, that you could start right now — or at least today?