The holiday season is coming to an end with new years this week. I enjoyed spending time with family and friends, however I am lucky (or unlucky) enough to be surrounded by great cooks and bakers. It seems like I’ve been to at least one if not two or three parties a week where I’ve overeaten for the past two months. When did the holiday season turn into 1/6th of the year???
Luckily for me the Downtown Fitness Club of Rochester is sponsoring us to help be prepared for our journey. I’ve also been fortunate enough to meet a personal trainer, Brian Quinn, who is helping us train correctly. Our first workout was a well rounded 30 minutes of tabata. For those of you who don’t know, tabata is a 4 minute set of exercises. We started with squats. We did squats as fast as we could for 20 seconds which set the number we needed to get each round. (Brian was smart and didn’t tell us that’s why we were counting until after, otherwise our numbers would have been much smaller). Once you have your number you do seven more sets of the exercise getting the same number each time with 10 seconds of rest in between each set. It should only take 4 minutes to do all 8 sets. So far everyone I’ve told about tabata think it must be easy to do 4 minutes of exercies. That is my favorite part. As soon as someone claims it must be easy, it only takes 4 minutes to show them how wrong they are. So far I’ve only had one friend finish all 8 sets and he cursed me the next day. So for all of you who have a friend whose new year resolution is to lose weight, put them through tabata (even if it’s only the four minute version).
Brian has a great dream. He wants to help people become physically active no matter what shape they’re in. He has created an event that he calls Every Day in May. Every May he drives around the country and gets groups of people to work out. He finds people at schools, gyms or offices and shows them an easy routine that they could use to become more physically active. Last year he made it to 29 states and worked out with over 2,000 people! His goal is to exercise with 11,000 people (I can’t remember the significance of this number but I’ll fill you in after the next time I see Brian). He has such a rewarding dream. As he accomplishes it he is helping others. His website is www.everydayinmay.com I strongly encourage everyone to work out with him if he’s coming near you in May. I can tell you I feel lucky to have met Brian and I think everyone he meets probably gets that impression. He was kind enough to put out the word about our project to his friends, family and fans and tons of them have been looking into Walk the Dream. It has also been relieving to hear him talk about how friendly complete strangers can be on the road when they hear that you’re traveling around the country.
For now it is late and I have to go to the gym in the morning. Which reminds me, come to the downtown fitness club on January 4th at 10:00am. For 5 dollars you can work out with the Walk the Dream team. We’ll do an average day of working out and get to know everyone who comes out. Not to mention if you don’t like the working out part there is always the hot tub!
-Keep Dreaming
