Tag Archives: half-marathon

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NEW DAY 300: Love story

Today is my 300th day of this… thing. Nearly 10 straight months of… doing this… this.

Not “journey”. I’m already not much for euphemisms, and that one is so over-used, it’s at the living edge of cliché meaninglessness.

Journeys imply a trajectory with some amount of planning; a clear starting point with a clear destination. A trip of some length, but overall pleasurable.

My past 300 days have skewed positive, but that’s where the similarities end. My this has been meandering. At times haphazard, and at other times meticulous.

Uncharted. Arduous. Surprising. Surreal.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I can’t picture exactly what it will look like when I get there. I have no idea how long it will take. I’m forging a path forward by instinct and knowledge I accumulate as I go, in a self-contained world with its own rules, patterns, and logic that don’t always hold parity with anything in the larger world. The experience is changing me in every way. And I have no intention of going back to the home I left.

It’s more like an odyssey. That combination of strangeness, adventure, movement, and purposeful quest.

I’ve learned how to nourish myself well.
I’ve learned how to move my body safely, in ways that push it to new heights and help it strengthen.
I’ve learned how to channel my positive emotions into healthy pursuits.
I’ve learned how to process my negative emotions through healthy outlets.
I’ve learned how to honor the commitments I make to myself, even — especially — when it’s not convenient.
I’ve learned how to take up more space through taking up less space.
I’ve learned how to say yes.
I’ve learned how to say no.
I’ve learned how to challenge myself in the right ways.
I’ve learned that movement and self-care are gifts, not punishments.
I’ve learned what I’m really made of, because I gave myself the chance to shine in the dark.

That’s not a journey. That’s a love story. A self-love story.

The 115-pound (and counting) weight loss, the 6-size (and counting) decrease in pants sizes, the rings that fall off fingers and necklines that slip off shoulders and shoes that slide off feet… details. Minor plot points. Background noise. The main character is still venturing forth, ready to meet the future.

Will she live happily ever after? I don’t know. I certainly hope so.

More importantly than hoping, though — I believe it’s possible. Because she’s making it possible.

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NEW DAY 293: Slow burn

My weight loss has been crawwwwwwling for the past 3 months. Yes, a slow-down is normal in drastic weight loss after months of quick drops. And also yes, I’m undoubtedly in body recomposition right now. And yes again, 23.8 pounds is still arguably a respectable amount to lose in 12 weeks. Yeses and valid justifications aside, this glacial pace is not my jam.

It got to the point that for the first time since June, I lost a DietBet. Like, it wasn’t even close; in 3 weeks, I only lost 3 lbs and missed my 4% goal of 187.5 by 4.9 lbs. I hadn’t even broken into the 180s.


Unfortunately, I was on a bit of a DB sign-up spree at the time I signed up for that March Mayhem Kickstarter, so two more were a week from closing — and I was even further from those goals of exactly 187.0.

Ugh. Now I was losing more money than weight.

What could I do but lose graciously? I thought of it as rebalancing the sheet of me taking other people’s money these past 10 months. Can’t win ’em all.

What I did not do was use this VERY minor setback as an excuse to go off the rails. The thought never entered my mind. I stuck to the plan.

What was the plan? The plan was to thwart this sluggish plateau-adjacent nonsense which has overstayed its (never-really-)welcome. Historically, my body has responded well to a bit of healthy, intentional upheaval, so I decided to mix things up with a zero-sugar week — not even any fruit (RIP reliable breakfast staple). In the process of designing that menu for this week, I noticed that I had never adjusted my daily calorie intake down to account for my body’s smaller size. Since I’m being honest, I’ll confess one more cardinal sin: I haven’t been tracking my calorie intake at all. My plates have been filled with balanced whole foods and I’ve been training my body, so I never stopped to question if the food could be behind the stalling weight loss. It’s no wonder that until this moment, I didn’t realize how small my deficit had become. After crunching the numbers from my past several weeks’ worth of meals, the fact was inescapable: I was just barely outside of the maintenance zone. Honey, we are not in maintenance yet! That my body had been allowing me to burn any fat at all was a bit of a miracle. (THANK YOU, BODY!) I also decided to pump the brakes on intense cardio this week — a dubious call with a half-marathon less than a month away, but hey, I live on the edge — and switch to post-meal digestion walks coupled with a focus on strength and core work.

With all this in mind, I dutifully refined my week’s menu to stay within a daily deficit appropriate to weight loss, compiled my grocery list, made the haul, and batch-prepped all 3 meals in full on Saturday. My exercise plan shifted immediately, even with erratic temperatures and weather conditions throwing wrenches left and right. With two impending DB weigh-ins with windows of Monday-Tuesday and Tuesday-Wednesday, it wasn’t looking good when the scale spat out 191.2 at my Sunday weigh-in — a measly half-pound down from the previous week.

As someone who ignores the scale at every other time, it was a major departure when something possessed me to check that cheeky appliance on Monday morning.

And it was an even more-major departure when that little imp showed me 187.2.
As in, 0.02 lbs away from both DB goals, literally overnight.

I am not a fan of this type of suspense. I can barely tolerate it in a cozy mystery. I arguably can’t tolerate it at all cinematically. In real life, forget it. I am not built for drama.

This was a real test of mettle. I could go extreme and over-exercise and under-fuel and wring my hands for the ensuing 24 hours, or I could honor my commitment and trust my body and the process to respond well enough to result in DB victories. After all, this whole thing is about so much more than a few DietBets. Winning/keeping money is great, but it’s in no way healthy to go full nutcase at the possible expense of the broader arc. That type of compulsive behavior is the ugly cousin of what got me to over 300 lbs. So I chose responsibly and made my peace with the fact that the die was cast already, and all I had to do was stay the course — my body had just given me a loud and clear signal that it was happy with what I was doing. This was a moment to listen, not to hijack the convesation.

And, well…


I just love a story with a happy ending, don’t you?

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NEW DAY 291: Still Bad

Sometimes stuff just hits.

I’m spending more time outside now, taking as many opportunities as I can to walk outside and maximize my time on my feet now that we’re inside 30 days before the half marathon. As I learned during 75 Hard, being outside lifts my spirits almost instantly — even when I have to drag myself out the door for it. On an evening walk today, I got caught in a light rain, which happened to coincide with Spotify serving me an irresistible bop. So naturally, my walk turned into a strut, which turned into a flat-out dance.

My uphill party of one went on for the remainder of the 10-minute walk between where I was and my front door, even as passing cars sporadically sped past. With about 5 minutes left, “Still Bad” by Lizzo came on and it was almost too on the nose to bear. As my boogie-ing took off into the stratosphere, a big fancy SUV started coming up the road behind me. It slowed down as it approached a stop sign, and I saw the driver look my direction as the car pulled even with me. With a slight moment of hesitation as he continued to roll forward, he gave me a couple little horn blasts. And I don’t know exactly why, but it absolutely made my day. And I… gave him a big cheesy grin and WAVED as he drove away.

Maybe I should be more self-conscious about my physical behavior in public. But you know what? I spent my entire adult life being self-conscious everywhere, with everyone, all the time. Add to that the fact that at this time last year, trying to make it up that incline would have taken me all the way out. Now, I can dance up it, for the multipleth time that day, in the rain.

Damn right I give zero fucks what anybody thinks.

This is healing.



Plot twist: I’m doing great
I make that been-through shit look sexy anyway 
🔥

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NEW DAY 281: Legwork

I haven’t always been the kindest to my legs.

In addition to — and in no small part because of — the heavy load they’ve had to haul for nearly the entirety of their load-bearing lives, I’ve derided them for their too-wide-for-boots muscularity and unfeminine appearance. Disrespecting them for the appearance they took on as a direct result of the abuse I inflicted on my body, which became their burden. Classic insult to injury.

Since I’ve been losing weight and training for a half marathon, the demand on my legs has anything but lessened, even as my body mass has. The musculature is even more pronounced as my calves slim down. My knees have taken on a knobbiness they’ve never had before. There’s definition and shape developing as the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in my thighs develop and strengthen. My ankles are popping, and not in the injury-adjacent way the normally do.

My legs don’t look different, exactly; they look more unabashedly themselves.
And I’m learning to love them.

They’ve done a thankless job for decades. They may never look conventionally attractive. They may never fit into a cute autumn boot. They may never stop a speeding cab with their irresistible curvature. But they have always held me. They supported me. They carried me.
They are strong, and they are tireless.
They are perfectly mine.

Before? Hide the legs! Keep them out of others’ view! Pants year-round!
Now? Electric blue workout pants. Highlighter pink tights. Dresses. Skirts. Dare I say, SHORTS… coming soon.

This is the type of change that matters the most to me. I’m getting healthier mentally — and that’s been the entire purpose of all of this.

If I can learn to love my legs…

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NEW DAY 277: Spring refresh

Spring is here! Appropriately, I am springing into a new phase of this whole health revolution of mine.

I know myself well, so I have known from the beginning that I would need to keep things interesting so I could stay engaged with the process as time went on. That’s been the philosophy behind my medium-term challenges, like 75 Hard, half-marathon training, and Power 11. As the half approaches and Power 11 draws to a close (7 days left!), I’ve also reached a new level of fitness: I feel motivated to start targeting new muscle groups to keep improving my strength, and my body is physically capable of doing more.

With that in mind, I have started getting more experimental, exploratory, and expansionist with my exercise. I’ve begun incorporating core work into my cross-training. I’ve meandered new paths on my local trails, which led to the discovery that I can walk to them from my house — a total game-changer that I will be taking full advantage of now that the weather is becoming more favorable. I’ve invested in an adjustable kettlebell that will turbo charge my sessions by combining cardio and strength for a full-body workout. In the coming weeks, my gym will begin finally offering the pilates classes I signed up for back in January when they first announced them. All of this serves the important dual purposes of giving me variety so there is no physical complacency and providing novelty so there is no mental complacency. I am genuinely looking forward to getting into all these new activities!

It feels good to be this far into my Big Change and still be enthusiastic and committed to the process, which was exactly the point of planning against boredom. It’s been 9 straight months of intensity that was always hard work — even when it didn’t feel like it — because I’ve ensured there would be fun involved. The same goes for meals: I’m eating healthy food, but I’m not eating anything I don’t like. In the gym as well as in the kitchen, you don’t have to sacrifice flavor. Keep it spicy, fam. 🌶️

A week from today, all of my Power 11 results will be in. I’ve already laid out the clothes I’ll be wearing in my final progress pics that day: the same pieces I wore in my day 1 photos and have not put on again since. I’m looking forward to seeing the outcome across several metrics of what I’ve been tracking since January 11th!

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NEW DAY 266: If the shoe (no longer) fits…

…you may be experiencing triple-digit weight loss.

For the past few weeks, my body has been doing weird new things that I would have expected at a larger size, but never encountered before. Now that I’m smaller, it’s thrown me to experience:

  • Intermittent lower back pain for stretches of days at a time with no clear trigger
  • Toenails on the big toe of each foot whose outer corners I’ve had to excavate from the nail bed every few weeks
  • Numbness on the balls of my feet setting in on long walks or runs
  • CALF SORENESS!!! Of all the strange symptoms, this has been most puzzling; my calves have always been extraordinarily muscular and never had a problem hauling wide loads all over the globe. You’d think they’d be quieter than ever now that they have 106 fewer pounds to carry!

Never one to let a mystery go unsolved, I logged these irregularities in my mental notepad and went about looking for a pattern that could link them together.

Then today, while seated at the bicep curl machine and dreading my cardio session because of the unrelenting back ache, I recalled how my feet were sliding forward into the toe boxes of the shoes I had on during my trail walk yesterday. They didn’t used to do that. It then struck me that my indoor gym shoes were making the same thing happen on the elliptical. That’s when the chain reaction of realizations connected all the recent exhibits of my body’s unusual behavior. If my shoes — every pair — are now too big, that means my feet have gotten smaller.

When there’s too much extra room in shoes, the feet slide forward against the edge of the sneaker and wreak havoc on toenails. Excess interior shoe space forces feet to try to gain traction within the shoe while also trying to use the shoe to gain traction on the ground outside of it, putting extra pressure on the balls of the feet and straining the midfoot. The legs (and ankles) have to work harder to maintain stability. Then it all travels up to the lower back, which is trying to compensate for all the shenanigans that the entire wayward muscle chain below it is causing.

No wonder my body is throwing a minor tantrum.

Needless to say, I have a pair of tennis shoes arriving soon — half a size smaller. This is such lucky timing; I have ALMOST bought new ones a few times in the past couple of weeks, and I’m so glad I didn’t because they would have been the wrong size. Even better, this gives me about 6 weeks to break in the new kicks before my half marathon the first weekend of May. It’s a shame my lower body had to mildly suffer to get my brain to figure this out, but at least it wasn’t in vain — and frankly, for the amount of avoidable silliness I put it through, its protests were quite tame (which I appreciate).

This revelation was a heckuva way to mark day 60 of Power 11.

Weight loss.
A trek through absurdity.

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NEW DAY 236: Stupor Bowl Sunday

Well, I had a pretty duh moment day yesterday.

Somehow in the past 2 days or so, I managed to tweak my back. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it did inform my decision to take a rest day yesterday, opting instead to spend it and most of today laid up on top of my heating pad. After taking it easy today to not only treat my back, but also to bank on a crowdless gym during the Super Bowl when I went to complete my half-marathon running session as planned, I hit a snag: I failed to remember that the Sunday gym hours are shorter than on weekdays. By the time I got there, as the employee at the check-in desk informed me, they were 18 minutes from closing.

There went my planned 45-minute treadmill session and strength training circuit.

For a split second, I considered taking a second rest day in a row. What was the point of a 15-minute workout?

Consistency. Showing up for myself. That was the point. That’s the entire point of all of this.

So I dutifully took my place on a treadmill in the nearly empty gym, making it my purpose to log a mile. My treadmill pace has been a modest 4.3 mph; in under 15 minutes, I was not going to be able to pull off the distance I wanted, even with a truncated 1-minute walking warm-up. So my pace tonight — and from this moment until the next increase — was 4.5.

I got 1.02 miles in 14 minutes.

Seahawks. Patriots. Whatever.
After snatching a victory from the jaws of defeat, I feel like the true champion of Super Bowl Sunday 😏

This coming week is going to be about some serious pushing of limits.

I can’t wait.

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NEW DAY 222: It’s an ice day for a run

It’s not the most glamorous way to blog, but I’m propped up on a pile of pillows topped with heating pad #1 resting against my lower back while heating pad #2 hugs my neck and shoulders. Shoveling 10+ inches of snow from a driveway that seems to magically expand with each Herculean scoop can apparently have this effect. I’ve only gotten about 30% of the snow cleared after 75 laborious minutes today, and there’s more of it on the way tomorrow! God rest my s(h)oul(ders).

As much as I’m very much not loving doing this exhausting chore in sub-freezing temperatures, I’m finding motivation from a surprising source. It’s not because I’m the only one who can do it. It’s not because I’m coming up with clever rewards for myself for making progress. (I’m not, but damn, that probably would have been smart.) It’s not even because of my supreme abhorrence for feeling trapped, which I quite literally am so long as my car has no means of egress from this house.

It’s… because I need to run.
Not want.
Not feel like.
Need.

Yup. My running addiction is officially so serious that it is now the driver for me to dig out untold cubic feet of heavy snow for hours. I am compelled to exert myself physically by the promise of more intense exercise.

^I saw this on Instagram the other day and instinctively screen grabbed it. As unhinged as the sentence that preceded the above image sounds, it’s true — and it’s because running has saved my sanity this past year. That’s not an overstatement, an exaggeration, a hyperbole, or a dramatization; it’s a fact. I owe everything that finally started going right last summer, to running.

Excavating the snow between me and the nearest treadmill is going to take a lot of time (and heating pads and Advil) across a stretch of 2-3 days, but I’m not the least bit deterred. I’m too eager to get back to the gym to resume my training sessions. Who knew that could even be a thing?!

I’ve been reluctant to claim the title “runner” for myself; runners are lean and fit and proper athletes. The half-marathon I’m participating in selected exclusively people who meet that description as their official ambassadors for their race events, so this is not a definition I’ve invented; it’s societal. Runners look the part.

But you know what? Runners are also chonky and awkwardly built and accident-prone messes with bum ankles. They are tentative and unskilled and constantly sore. They are learning and graceless and quick to sweat. They are hopeful and resilient and tough self-coaches who are stronger than they look.

I read somewhere that if you run, you can call yourself a runner.

I’m a runner.

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NEW DAY 221: Blizzard!

I’m in the huge swath of the US that’s being pummeled with 24+ straight hours of falling snow. As I write this, my internet is verging on an outage that has lasted nearly half the day, so I’m tethering my phone in order to post this lest I fail my Power 11 tasks. BUT dropped wifi is the smallest inconvenience I can imagine of the many that had the potential to occur during this storm, so I am certainly not complaining!

Knowing that this crazy weather event was coming to paralyze us for at least a day or two, I reconfigured my half-marathon training plan to give myself a rest day today, and to make tomorrow a cross-training day so that I can do it from home. (Also, I’m considering the hours of shoveling I’ll be doing tomorrow as upper-body strength training, cuz clearing an entire driveway of a foot of heavy, wet snow is nothing if not a workout.) It kinda stinks to miss this stretch of days from actual proper running, but them’s the breaks. I’m adapting as best I can and staying active even if it looks different from “usual”. Between the snow and my end-of-week travel, this whole week is going to require some creative license, so it’ll be an adventure.

It can be a chore to coax myself out the door for a gym session sometimes, but truly the toughest piece of Power 11 so far has been limiting my weight checks to once per week. It’s been getting slightly easier, but sometimes the urge to peek is pretty strong, especially when I suspect I’ll like what I see. I’ve been noticing a lot of physical changes lately, which is usually an indicator of a friendly upcoming scale reading, so I was highly anticipating today’s weigh-in. Sure enough, I posted a drop of 3.4 lbs for this week!

This means a few big things:

  1. I am currently at my lowest weight in 10 years. My all-time lowest (real-adult) weight was from March 1st of 2016.
    • I’m 12.6 lbs away from that number.
    • By March 1st of this year, I should be below it. (🤯)
    • I will be below it.
  2. I am only 3.8 lbs away from being 100 lbs down from my highest recent weight, recorded about 11 months ago.
    • If I hit that milestone by a specific date within the next 3 weeks, it will be the ultimate redemption for me.
    • I’m comfortably on track to do it.
    • I’m gonna do it.
  3. I’m within spitting distance of Onederland. (Actual pounds away: 5.2 lbs. And now you know how much I weigh. And have weighed. 🫣)
    • Yeah — I unhid my weight on DietBet the other day.
    • I don’t have a specifically meaningful date in mind for this, but it’ll be sometime next month.
    • Something’s getting pierced after that.

I’d say I can’t believe it, except I totally can. My body is sore all over in that satisfying way that whispers, “yes, you did run 5 elliptical miles and then do 30 minutes of strength training yesterday.” My obliques are the sorest part of me, and that’s purely from actual running.

It feels so good to feel sore. I’m getting smaller, yes, but I’m also getting stronger and fitter. THAT’S what this type of soreness means. It means results. It means effectiveness. It means payoff.

Since I got serious about my health in mid-June of last year, I have lost 76.6 pounds. When June rolls back around this year, I will have lost more than 100 lbs, completed 75 Hard, finished Power 11, and crossed the finish line of a freakin’ half-marathon — all since the previous June.

January-2025 Me wouldn’t recognize Present-Day Me — physically or otherwise.

And that’s fucking transformation, baby.

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NEW DAY 207: Power 11

Inspired by true events, I have developed a spin-off series for the next 11 weeks of my life: Power 11.

The idea for this type of project came from a need I’ve felt to reset after my end-of-year travel. It was a vacation not just from real life, but from responsibility, routine, and regulation. I didn’t go crazy by any means — in fact, I continued to exercise most days while visiting people overseas whom I haven’t seen in years, even setting a new PBR in walking speed (3.7 mph) and continuous treadmill running (20 minutes) before 2025 was out. However, I did allow myself to not obsess over nutrition, sleep cycles, or half-marathon training. I decided instead to trust myself to respect my body’s limits by simply remaining attuned to its signals, knowing that I would be able to resume my regimen when I returned home.

This sparked my realization that there are tons of parallels between this recent trip and the one I took in the summer. In both cases, I:

  • Made long-overdue reconnections with people I love in places I know for 2+ weeks
  • Was heading out with a job offer I’d be starting a few days after coming back
  • Felt the importance of needing to cement a structure for myself that would continue prioritizing my mental and physical health while allowing me to adjust to a new professional setting and schedule

I started 75 Hard on a lark with barely 24 hours’ lead time to prepare back in August. In spite of the suddenness of that decision, the challenge not only served me well structurally, but it was also an unqualified success overall. With that knowledge, I figured the time was right for another program — but this time, with modifications that make more sense for my purposes without letting me off the hook for what makes 75 Hard, hard.

Here’s what I came up with:

DAILY TASKS

  1. TRAINING
    I will follow my half-marathon training plan to the letter every day. Each week includes 4 days of run training, 1 day of strength training, 1 day of cross-training, and 1 day of no training (rest). I tweak the plan at the start of each week and/or as needed in response to things like schedule changes, weather, injury, etc. There has to be reasonable flexibility because life be life-ing. The important thing is that I stay committed to building my endurance so that I will be ready come race day.
    Differences from 75 Hard: Only one workout per day. If I do another movement session because I feel like it, that’s fine, but it is NOT a requirement. It is likewise not a requirement for any additional daily workouts to be 3 hours apart from the other(s). There is no mandatory outdoor exercise stipulation as part of this plan, but my half-marathon training plan will start to include outdoor sessions as the race approaches.
  2. MOVEMENT
    I will meet my daily steps goal, including on rest days (more on that below).
    Differences from 75 Hard: This is not part of that program.
  3. DIET
    Instead of observing a zero-tolerance policy on added sugar*, I will follow a refined — pun mostly intended — sugar restriction plan of no desserts, no sweetened drinks, and no simple carbs. In foods I prepare myself, there will be NO added sugar. In all other cases, I will consciously choose options with as little sugar as possible, to the best of my ability to ascertain it. (I would prefer to do no sugar at all, but it’s simply too restrictive to be practical.)
    “Sugar” includes sugar substitutes, which are just as bad, if not worse.
    Differences from 75 Hard: This component of 75 Hard is customizable, so different people create different rules.
  4. WATER
    I will drink at least 1 gallon of water every day.
    Differences from 75 Hard: None.
  5. ALCOHOL
    No alcohol consumption. This almost goes without saying since all alcohol contains sugar, but as I’m doing **restricted** sugar, I’m keeping it as its own rule.
    Differences from 75 Hard: None.

WEEKLY TASKS

  1. REST
    In a total deviation from 75 Hard, my program requires one day off from exercise per week. Bodies need rest, especially bodies training for long-distance runs while aiming to avoid and prevent injuries. Recovery is just as important as getting after it.
    Differences from 75 Hard: 75 Hard allows zero rest days throughout the program, and any day off constitutes a failure of the challenge.
  2. READING
    I never fully understood the reading component of 75 Hard, but I did come to appreciate the enforced quiet time to focus on something other than “toughness”. In addition to trying to incorporate more stillness into my life, and as a nod to the 2026 Book Bingo challenge I am participating in, I’ve included a reading task in my Power 11 challenge.
    Differences from 75 Hard: I am only requiring it once a week rather than every day. I must read, uninterrupted by phone checks or randomly getting up and wandering around, for at least 30 minutes at some point during the day. “Uninterrupted” also means “not while on an exercise machine” — the point is stillness, and that means dedicated time with undivided attention. I can read more than once a week, but the time commitment and focus rules are only required once a week. Finally, I can read any genre I want; it doesn’t have to be non-fiction or have a self-improvement bent.
  3. WRITING
    I will make at least two blog posts per week. This gives me positive reinforcement for my mental health and fitness efforts while also providing an outlet for my always-buzzing brain.
    Differences from 75 Hard: This is not part of that program.
  4. PROGRESS PHOTOS
    I found the daily progress selfies to be the most annoying part of 75 Hard — and complete overkill. I do like the idea of being able to track the physical changes through photographic evidence, though, so I’m keeping it as a weekly action. I’m also explicitly stipulating both a head-on pic and a pic in profile each week.
    Differences from 75 Hard: Weekly instead of daily, and with two different views/angles rather than leaving this unspecified.
  5. MEASUREMENTS
    I will record the circumferences of my ankle, calf, thigh, waist, hips, bust, neck, tricep, forearm, wrist, and ring finger. (Perhaps excessive, but what can I say? I like data.)
    Differences from 75 Hard: This is not part of that program.
  6. WEIGHT TRACKING
    I will weigh myself every Sunday and record that number as my official weight for the week. I will NOT weigh myself more often than that, unless I have a weigh-in or weigh-out for a DietBet that does not fall on a Sunday.
    Differences from 75 Hard: This is not part of that program.

As with 75 Hard, any missed task for the day or week, for any reason, constitutes a failure and ends the challenge immediately. If I want to complete the challenge after a failure, I will have to start over at day one the next day. This is the same as 75 Hard.

You may be wondering: why the fixation on 11? Well, it wasn’t exactly intentional — but it also wasn’t exactly coincidental.

Something that bugged me about 75 Hard was that the first day post-challenge couldn’t mathematically fall on the same day of the week as the starting day. That means that the timeline for the full dataset of the final “week” of the challenge is 29% shorter than every other week. As I said, I like data, and this inconsistency is super annoying. In order for my program to comprise full weeks for a comparable duration, it would need to be 70 days or 77 days long. I went with 77, because why lower the bar? But I didn’t want to name it something based on the days; I wanted it to be based on the weeks. And that’s how it hit me that what I created is an eleven-week challenge.

I had also already planned to begin with day one as today: the 11th of January — because I want to start on a weigh-in day (which has always been Sunday for me), and have a weigh-in day also be my first post-challenge day when all the results would be locked. The number 11 has become significant in my autobiographical mythology this past year, so this seemed like a powerful connection. And that’s how Power 11 got its name.

From there, I noticed that my program had a list of 10 to-dos and 9 body measurements to track. Full disclosure: I did add one rule (no alcohol) and two measurements (hips and ring finger) to get to 11 of each. Hokey? Sure. Too hokey? Not for this girl.

And now that I’ve blogged (✅), it’s time for the official “before” measurements and selfies! See you back here again at least once more this week, like a good little rule follower.

Here we go again!