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Writing It Down

A little while ago, the Mild Fiancée and I decided to set a weekly fitness goal for ourselves. It started before the new year, so it wasn't quite a new year's resolution. Still, we wanted some way to hold ourselves accountable, even if we weren't going to the gym super regularly.

Every week, we set a target for ourselves. It's not meant to be a ridiculously high number or a complex movement that takes lots of equipment. No, we pick something simple that you can do just about anywhere, whether that be our apartment or the gym of our choice. Something like squats or push ups (incidentally, those happened to be the exercises we picked for the first couple of weeks).

However, the idea was that it had to be a high enough target that you wouldn't reasonably do it all in a single day. For example, the very first week, we said that we had to complete 1000 air squats that week. That works out to, on average, a little more than 140 squats every day. That's the sort of thing where you have to put in some effort to hit, but it's also not going to kill you. You can safely do that in a day and come back the next day to do it again. It doesn't even have to be consecutive reps: if I do 10 squats when I wake up and 10 squats before I go to bed, that counts as 20 for the day. Essentially, it's meant to be a reachable goal.

Of course, none of us is perfect. Sometimes, we lag on things, so we have to catch up the following day. I know I've had that happen to me. One day, I did something like 20 push ups, and the next day, I did over 100. Yeah, I'm not always good about doing my reps.

In fact, I turned a white board we had lying around the house into an unofficial-official scoreboard, precisely so that we could remind ourselves not to slack that day. If you see a big fat 0 for a single day, you know that the number in the next row is going to have to be much bigger. It's a visual reminder, if you will.

Well, one day, the Mild Fiancée had to catch up. It was the end of the week, and she had a big number to reach in order to hit the weekly goal. We both knew she could bang it out, it was just a matter of concerted effort. So, she set her mind to it, and did every last one of those reps. I know, because I helped her count (think of it as moral support).

She was understandably proud of herself for finishing it all out, so she put it out there on social media. My favorite response was, paraphrased, "so, yeah ... you and Sam are meant for each other. You're both crazy enough to do stuff like that." We were both thoroughly, thoroughly amused by that.

We really need to keep this whole weekly goal thing going. It might lead to a few more funny social media posts.
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