The Joy of Challenging Birthday Workouts
Last week I did 31 chin-ups, 31 air squats, 31 push-ups, and 31 reverse lunges on each leg as fast as I could (along with a 31-mile bike ride a couple of days after that). The burn that I felt in my hands made me seriously doubt my life decisions, but I still loved every minute of it.
For the past several years, every year on my birthday, I have done some unusual workout . Last year I did one set of 30 squats with a barbell equivalent to my body weight. It was terrible in the best possible sense of the word. Last year I swam only 29 laps. I’ve immortalized this year’s horrific 20 minutes in the fun looking slow motion video below.
This workout is my way of marking another year that has passed , helping me to escape the cruise control I inevitably found myself in. They remind me that it’s good to feel physically uncomfortable when everything else feels good (and it can be fun … maybe).
Despite the fact that this past training was difficult, my workout for the day of birth has nothing to do with the training of Heidi Fedorov, dedicated to the 40th anniversary. As a philanthropist from New York, Dorova came up with a crazy idea: every hour for 40 hours in a row, she drove through tires, crawled on her arms and legs, pulled weights on ropes, climbed and descended stairs and rushed through them. an internal two-mile obstacle course she built at Judson Church in New York.
She shook him, although she did not survive unharmed. But it wasn’t just for her birthday celebration. Dorova, now 52, told me that she has always been fascinated by the extreme conditions that ultra-high endurance athletes put themselves in. (Some of these ” ultramarathons, ” like the Badwater Ultramarathon, can be up to 135 miles in length.)
So for her, this training was like suffering. But perhaps most of all she wanted to make sure she still feels and looks strong as she gets older. “Age breeds complacency and the desire for more comfort. We use physical activity as a way to overcome the boundaries [of aging], ”Dorov said.
Get started with your own challenge
You can do a hard workout on your birthday, but it doesn’t have to be on your birthday.
And the “challenge” looks different for everyone. For example, The Atlantic wrote about how people happily pay to participate in dangerous, grueling , military-style obstacle races to avoid office boredom. Hundreds of thousands of people sign up for distance races around the world. More than 50,000 runners competed in the 2016 New York Marathon alone. I also ran a marathon. Once. Then there is Joel Runyon , who has ridden seven ultra marathons on seven continents , and said, “What I love about ultras is that they go beyond what most people even think is possible.”
Meaning? Do something, especially if you find yourself in a rut.
Your task doesn’t have to be that crazy, and you definitely don’t need to run ultra marathons ( maybe start at 5K! ). If you want to do something shorter and less time-consuming on the go, here are some ideas (where X could be your age):
- Sprint 100 yards X times
- Completing a traditionally long run or workout in less than X minutes
- X bodyweight squats in X seconds / minutes
- X number of burpees
- Attempt to maintain a crazy spin rate in the spinning class for X seconds or minutes
- Climb X feet on a rope
- Move X pounds X meters X times
- Do walking lunges for X minutes in a row
Forcing yourself to complete tasks of any length can be both awful and awesome at the same time – the workout itself or the activity itself is terrible , but the feeling after it makes you kind of forget the damn minutes and hours (looking back). Runyon also brings up the good point that after you’ve dealt with the struggles and pain of something like an ultramarathon or some other type of super-challenging workout, your day-to-day problems that seemed so daunting before seem much more solvable … or maybe even trite.
However, whatever you do, make sure you reach that level of fitness. Your workout should be challenging enough to knock you off track, but do not be so extreme and deviate from your abilities so that you will eventually hurt yourself. But hey, I’m not your mom.