Fitness Update

I mentioned in a previous post that I joined a 60 day fitness challenge at my gym a few months ago.  I am shocked, shocked to tell you that, guess who won the challenge?   the wimpiest one in the class!  yeah, me!  Here is the white board showing my victorious accomplishments:

I just found out yesterday that I won prizes too.  I got 3 personal training sessions, and 1 month membership to a climbing gym.  Those will be fun to cash in on.

One thing that helped me win is that we earned points for eating a Whole Foods Plant-Based diet!    I also improved my fitness, attended the classes regularly, converted some body fat to muscle, and took a lot of yoga classes, all of which earned points.  The best thing I learned from the challenge was that, by golly, I can improve!  Our classes are repeated 3 times each month.  Before the challenge, I was content with just showing up to class and getting through it.  Now I log my exercise, time, weight, etc, and try to improve each time the class is repeated.  I made some substantial improvements in areas that surprised me, like some challenging core exercises and weights.  I had a mindset that I'm weak and there is nothing to be done about it but now I'm thinking I can get a little bit stronger.

Now I have a new challenge.  I'm hoping to do a backpacking trip next fall that I had to cancel this fall.  So I signed up to climb the Hancock building in Chicago on Feb. 25.  That's 94 floors.  I started training about 3 weeks ago with my basement stairs.  I started with 10 flights in a day and am increasing by 1 flight a day.  I'm up to 32 flights right now.   Fun tools to help me with that are my clicker and my stair log posted on the refrigerator.
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Here are the stairs that I am becoming close personal friends with: