2013 New Year’s resolution, aka crowdsourcing pressure.

Oct 132012
 

I’ve had many discussions about self-motivation vs pressure and I’ve had to come to the sad realization/admission that when it comes to self-motivation and my weight, it just ain’t there.

But people seem to be less and less eager to get into weight bets with me.  Or at least, they make them more and more complicated that we just can’t agree on terms.

The Tailgate sampler platter at BW3s doesn’t help either.

So the only thing left to do is crowdsource pressure.  Here’s my New Year’s Resolution/Bet:

In 2013, if we are ever out for a meal or a drink and you casually ask me if I’m under 213, if I can’t say “Yes” honestly, I’ll pick up your tab.  As easy as that.  Benefit from hanging out with the fat man.

I’ll weigh myself at least once a week. And will fess up about my weight if things ain’t right.

Now, Catherine might not let me go out for meals if I’m over, but that’s a different problem.

Maybe that’ll encourage more people to invite us out?

At least Sal gave Steve Young a high-five.

Mar 062011
 

Though afterwards, when Sal was walking away, I told Steve he was a Cheesehead. Steve appropriately grimaced at the thought.

One of the staffers at the fitness challenge this year, was talking to me about my score and said “the top score is only in the 500s, so you’re not that far off.”  Yeah.  And the top score was put in by a Hall of Famer.  Who’s turning 50 this year.  Years of working out have given him some pretty good endurance I guess.  Though I heard there was some controversy around his burpees – though since he has bum wrists, he just fists the push up section.  You should keep that in mind if you have bum wrists.

400 was an internal goal.  Turns out internal goals, take explicit effort to achieve.  That’s the lesson for this year.  And next year.  I dropped two points this year, which was bad, but still good enough to:

  • beat Chuck by 1 point
  • cover my bet with Sonny +60 points.
  • cover my bet with Klaus straight up on the B level.
  • LOSE my bet with my sister straight up on the B level by 9.

So things were close – the betting lines were pretty decent.  Strategy has a lot to do with the scoring here.  As well as starting position.  I didn’t get to start on rowing like I had earned in our random draw, and that hurt my rowing score a bit.  But you gotta play the cards you’re dealt. And this year, I really need to improve my push press cards.  Really.  I think my sister did more per round than I did for the entire thing.  And jumps.  Jumps are a good way to get some fast points.  Should focus on that more.  Didn’t push hard enough on those this year.  Doing 10 more jumps is a lot more doable than doing 5 burpees for me.  Especially the order that they are in.

I think next year’s competition will be even better cause things were so closely packed.

The event and the 30 minutes afterwards are miserable, but the rest of it – the prep beforehand, the talking, the lack of true exercise, the lunch, the look of misery in each other’s eyes right afterwards, the soreness that sets in a few hours later, the feeling that you’ve earned a big fat mexican dinner, matching everyone’s donations because your sister beat you – all that makes the whole experience overall a ton of fun.

Peer pressure for charity.

Feb 252011
 

It is fitness challenge time again.

Ben is in the south bay now and should be available for the fitness challenge.  He’s 12+ years younger than me, hustles around the whole field while I just sit nervously in goal, does yoga and pilates, is a hands on rugby coach, and has a lower body fat percentage than me.

He should dominate me in this fitness challenge.

But he hasn’t signed up yet.

So, to help us motivate him and myself, I’m willing to match every donation I get for the fitness challenge if I don’t beat Ben’s score by 60.  That’s about 20 points a round.  Or about 15% of our recent scores.

So forget all that idle talk of whisper numbers and goals and all that jazz.  Sponsor me, then root for Ben to kick my butt in the fitness challenge!

All for a good cause.

He’s seen it before…

Nov 172010
 

Catherine’s betting me who can workout more days over the next 30 days.  Or about 20 days now.  500 swings of a 12kg bell for her. 24kg for me.  It’s not a trivial workout.  Hard to cut corners around it.

She has been a day ahead of me.  I think I didn’t do anything the first day, so she has always been a day ahead.  We even took a day off together once, cause we were tired.  I meant to get up and work out but I didn’t.  She has been pretty confident.  And I figured, if she worked out for 29 out of 30 days she deserved to win.  After all, this is the girl that was upset about doing 2 days a week during our last workout challenge.  So 29 out of 30 is a big change in heart.

She’s pretty motivated against me.  And others are rooting for her.  Everyone laughs at me for planning out what I’d like on my dream date (the stakes of the bet).  I mean, a Weinerschnitzel meal while getting a new exhaust installed on my car isn’t too far out there is it?  I think it’s really sweet actually.  But it gets laughs all around from people as she tells that story.

She’s feeling good.  Except for yesterday.  She was tired again.  And I caught up.  So we’re even now.  And we talked about it a bit this morning in front of Sal.  I think she felt a little despair – the comfort of that day lead must have felt great.  Now, she runs the risk of a tie at 28 out of 30 days worked out!  I think the prize for a tie is kissing your spouse.  She doesn’t seem elated.  I don’t know why.  I figured that’d be her dream date anyway.

But I loved watching Sal’s face during all of it.  We were all in the living room chatting and she was starting to do her swings (some in the morning and some in the evening is a way to make it less painful) and he was watching her and with my biased view on the world I imagined him thinking “There goes another noble challenger.  Nice try.  Now where are my Mighty Beanz?”

He’s seen this all before.  And she has too. I was impressed she wanted to challenge me, having seen what I’ve done in the past to win these things.  But all her subtle pats on my belly weren’t getting me to work out, so setting me up for a challenge was one way to get me to trim down.  From that point of view, it seems like a worthy sacrifice.  Except she enjoyed the lead so much.  I think that was really motivating for her.  I don’t know how motivating “maintaining a tie” will be.

What I really don’t know is why she agreed to do it 3 times in a row.  That was my only tweak to the bet.  I need to get in shape for the fitness challenge in March, so I needed to stretch out my motivation and it turns out my workouts are purely challenge motivated.  I think she’s more of a sprinter as far as motivation goes, so three times in a row is better for me.  3 cycles of 30 days lined up.  That’s 3 dream dates.

After the exhaust, I think my dream dates start getting a little out there.

Heart Attack grill in Phoenix.  And Garth Brooks in Vegas.

And then, there’s always Satin Jade…

Schrödinger’s competition

Jul 222010
 

For the body fat bet, up until the actual weigh in, one could feel like one had both won and lost.  I felt that actually.  Makes one pretty anxious and bi-polar.  It wasn’t until the actual measurements were done and shared did one truly know whether one had won or lost.

When talking to Ben about this biking bet, I was thinking at the start, that about 200 miles would win.  Maybe 250.  I was thinking 10+ miles a day.  I shared that with him.  With the notion that if Shawn knew that was my number, then the number might change.  We eventually included Ben running with a 3x multiplier for his miles into the bet.  He felt that 66 was a good number for him to run in 20 days and that would make him competitive.

Except that those estimates were for the case where we didn’t share numbers.

Now that we share numbers, the competition is way out of whack.  He’s close to 60 miles and we’re just halfway through and he’s barely in the lead.  The daily (almost minute-by-minute for some) reveal of stats has driven the competition into overdrive.

It’s out of control, waiting for someone to tap out.  The jockeying over IM, trying to size up if someone’s going to run/bike tonight…and if so how far…and if they share the number, will they actually keep their word about that or not.  If not, was it a bluff or was it sandbagging?

It’s no longer a physical feat wager…or maybe it never was.

If there’s one thing to learn from Lindsay Lohan…

Jul 102010
 

…or any of these other struggling stars, is that lifestyle changes don’t last a lifetime.  They sound like they might, life-style and life-time, but they don’t necessarily last a lifetime.

So, given that the goal of the last body fat percentage weight bet was to make a lifestyle change, we shouldn’t have been shocked to find that 3 months after the bet, the body fat percentage has been creeping the wrong way.  That is, if we were any smarter than Lindsay.

I’ve wanted a lifetime body fat percentage bet.  But have struggled to find people that want in.  It’d basically be split up into teams (reshuffled every so often) and each year, the teams would get body fat weighed and for every individual, you’d get their delta from “athletic” for their gender and age range.  And the team that scores the most below “athletic” for the year wins something. Teams are to allow competition with support groups. Lots of stuff TBD, but first participants need to be TBD.  Let me know if you want in.

Given that that isn’t happening, Shawn wanted a new bet today.  I thought 9 months would be good and we could bet on the next fitness challenge.  He was thinking something in the week timeframe.  Lots of different ideas were thrown around, lots of different concerns were thrown around.

Finally, we settled on a nice, low impact, good for my knee, can do after the kids are asleep challenge that can have a short time frame.

Most miles biked during the rest of July.

We both have mountain bikes.  We’ll be using RunKeeper on the iPhone.  We’ll share our maps with each other so that questionable “rides” can be pointed out. And all rides need to be in loops, by themselves or with an adjacent ride in the system (to avoid having Kari drive Shawn to Tahoe so he can ride down the mountain).

Of course, during this whole conversation, Catherine was constantly impressed with how many King’s Eggrolls I was able to roll through.  Impressed might be stating it too nicely.  But let’s call this new number, a nice, round Cris dozen.

So, nutrition isn’t part of this bet.  We’ll see how that effects things. The sharing of the numbers will be interesting. Each of us will know the other’s number daily…will that motivate or discourage?  We’ll find out.  There are a few reasons why I think Shawn will win and there are a few things going my way.  It’ll be close.  And I think, it’ll be repeatable.  I wouldn’t bet against a repeat bet in August. Or September.

Well, I guess it depends on Shawn’s mood.  I’d be up for it though.

 Older Entries