From January to May, I kept up pretty well with the challenge. When I knew I would be unable to do them, I would double up for a couple days before, sometimes doing as many as 60 a day finishing with a total of 4028 push-ups. And I hated every minute of it.
Around mid-May, when my birthday hit and I thought about what had changed in my life over the last year, I thought a lot about my mental health. I'm always less stressed and anxious when I am physically active. However, with this challenge, it was building anxiety and stress. And so I stopped.
This was a huge step for me. I am not good at backing down from a challenge (I am way too competitive!) nor have I been the best at prioritizing my mental health. Since my concussion, it is so much more fragile and I need to work hard to maintain it.
And so, I took other steps to work on my mental health by working on my physical health by doing things I actually enjoy. I got a Garmin to start tracking my activities, I bought an online yoga app, and made a list of hikes and places that I have always wanted to visit. I dropped down to 4 days of work per week so that I would have more time for me. I got out hiking, biking, snowshoeing and paddle boarding. But I did much more walking and yoga as well, realizing the importance of not always being so hard on my body, especially if I was feeling fragile or tired.
Living in Squamish where everyone is so focused on the outdoors, it is hard to spend a day at home when there is powder on the slopes or that perfect tacky dirt on the trails. But I am working hard on at not letting my expectations of what I think I should be doing or what others are doing get in the way of listening to my body.
And so, even though I didn’t finish the PushUp Challenge, here are some of my favourite physical challenges of 2021!
- A 22 km return hike to Elfin lakes to swim in the clear, calm waters surrounded by snowcapped mountain peaks.
- Hiking on Bowen Island after having it on my list for 10 years! (And finishing up for après at the chocolate shop.)
- Doing 50 or more kms of walking / hiking a month for 5 of the 7 months I was tracking it.
- Snowshoeing 11 km in a storm to the Journeyman’s lodge and 14 km back out after a couple nights in the backcountry. (The sent snowmobiles to pull us off the hill on our way in because it was getting dangerous out there.)
- 160 days that I was active in some way, even if that was just a 10 minutes yoga session.
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