Sunday, October 02, 2011

30 day challenge

After watching Matt Cutts' 30 day challenge TED talk, I decided to try out 30 day challenges.

August was no alcohol, and I counted it as a win - I did have a going away drink when my tech lead left, and I sampled some homebrew when I took gravity measurements. I learned that I had become too accustomed to having a beer in the evening - merely drinking it instead of enjoying it. I believe I have reset myself to opting in to alcohol instead of opting out.

September, I tried the One Hundred Push Ups program, but I dropped out after the first week. My form was terrible, and I hurt my lower back by going for numbers instead of quality. I may try this again later - I still hope to increase my upper body strength, and there's something about pushups that makes me feel more at home in my own body.

October's goal is to blog daily. I find myself more confident in my own head when I talk about or write about what's going on. I tend to be too in my own head to be conscious about what's going on at work or in some facets of my life. I believe that writing an entry every day will strengthen the reflection muscles and make me more present and conscious about what's going on (more on this struggle, hopefully, in another post later today). I think we all suffer from this at least a little - why else do answers come in the shower, or solutions to our bugs come when we're describing the problem to a coworker?

You might have noticed that this is posted on October second. Yesterday, I rode my bike over 100 miles on Levi's GranFondo. I decided on the ride that this would be my goal, but returned home at 8:30pm exhausted and mentally gone. So perhaps this month's challenge should have been "bike 100 miles or blog every day"!

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