Water

H to the 2-OH!

About how much water do you drink each day? Do you know? You need water to live - not sodas, energy drinks, "sports" drinks, or coffee.

I've been refilling these Starkey Spring Water glass bottles with my filtered tap water to take with me on the go lately and I'm keeping track of how much I drink each day. I'm not keeping a log of any sort, I'm just making a mental note of how much I'm drinking.

How's it going for me? Well, I can definitely say that I haven't been drinking this much water since about 6 years ago. Water was never really something that I wanted. It always felt like a chore to drink it. I grew up on sodas and juices and would hardly ever have a glass of water with a meal (I mean, I literally have no memory of ever having a glass of water with a meal when I was younger!).

Years ago when I started training Parkour, I made the decision to stop drinking soda so much. At first I just cut back a lot on it, and then I completely stopped drinking it. I remember feeling good about that decision! But then... somehow... I got hooked on coffee. It doesn't help to work at a Target that has a Starbucks in it. I was slamming 2-4 mochas on most of my work days. I'd be jittery and shaky but just ignore it because of all the "energy" I felt like it was giving me. At least back then I was drinking quite a bit of water, too.

Fast forward to present day - for many, many moons now I have been drinking cans of sparkling Yerba Mate teas, juices, non-mainstream sodas (because "if it's not Coke or Pepsi, it's not bad for me", right? Wrong...), almond milk drinks, coffees, smoothies - just about anything other than straight-up water. Well I had enough of it and finally put my money where my mind has been for at least several months now. I dropped caffeine all together and started drinking water all day. I'm a little over 1 week into this journey of flooding my body with the goodness of mother nature's original delicious liquid. The best part? I haven't had any headaches, I've been sleeping well, and I actually have more energy now than I did when I was saturating my body with caffeine and sugar.

This is a decision I am wholeheartedly happy with and plan to stick with for as long as I possibly can and I don't feel any temptation to go back to the drinks of yesterweek (made that word up, you can use it, it'll make you cool).

So why am I sharing this with you all anyway? The decision to drink water came from a yearning to put my training to work in another way. I like challenging myself and I like testing out my discipline occasionally. Caffeine (and sugar) are known to be an addictive substance that many Americans are consuming at alarming rates on a daily basis. We know there are health problems that arise from that over-consumption, so why do we keep choosing it? 

Me? I have the excuse that "I was raised on it". That wasn't enough for me anymore. I'm an adult, I know it's not good for me, and I am finally doing something about it and taking responsibility for the bad decisions I've been making. Honesty is a value of art du déplacement - and if you can't be honest with yourself, how are you going to get anything done? How would you make any change to be the person that you want to be?

If you don't know how much water you're drinking each day, do you really know whether you're getting enough of it?!

So... where's your agua?

Read about Street Movement's (Denmark) "Drik Vand" (Drink Water) campaign with an abundance of glorious reasons for everyone to switch to water - including how it ties into Parkour/ADD and how it can improve the public's general perception of our discipline. Make sure you watch their awesome video there also!

Routine & Challenge: Finding Discipline

A story of how a lack of discipline actually helped me to find more discipline.

This one is my own story. If I'm being honest, I am often very hard on myself. Looking back at 2015 now, I feel like I haven't done much or progressed at all. That's probably not true, but it's hard for me to tell myself that I've done enough. It wasn't until I was looking for things to share in this Weekly Training Inspiration that I remembered something I was very proud to accomplish earlier this year...

A Routine: 301 for 30

Feeling like I needed something to add as a routine to my daily life, I decided to start a challenge with myself and the team of our instructors to do 301 push-ups every day... for 30 days. That's 9,030 push-ups if you like math, or "OVER 9,000!" if you're into Dragon Ball Z or enjoy rounding because it's easier. The challenge started off well, though I must admit that doing the 301 every day in the first few days was leaving me quite sore.

Occasional Forgetfulness

Like probably everyone, I forget to do things now and then. Throughout the 30 days of our challenge, I would occasionally forget to finish my push-ups for the day, and so I would tack the remaining reps onto the next day. Some days it was something like 321 that I had to do, some days it was more like 361. Eventually, as we got into the end of the third week, I was starting to get a little too comfortable with the idea of being able to just rollover any missed reps to the following day. I started to use that to go to bed without finishing the day's push-ups, telling myself it didn't matter because I would do them the next day.

Piling Up

As maybe you've predicted by now - my push-ups began to pile up. I was missing large sets and pushing them to the next day. Always keeping track of what I didn't do (and being honest about it), but I started to worry even myself that I wasn't going to follow through with the challenge. And so... it was somewhere in that final week, I think we had 4 or 5 days left in our 30, and I had managed to pile up 883 push-ups owed. Yikes!

Excitement

Those of you who know me from the classes know that I usually enjoy pushing myself (and others!). I had 883 push-ups to do that day and I thought "well, I may as well go for 1,001". And that's what I did. My arms had gotten surprisingly accustomed to doing many sets over the course of the challenge. They were recovering quicker than... well, ever! I wasn't doing huge sets - I would mostly do sets of 10-20 at a time. It was a long night and I didn't have to be up early the next morning. I had knocked out 170 push-ups throughout the day, and finished the rest later in the night. It was a great feeling to know that I could accomplish this. It wasn't a part of the challenge originally, but I really enjoyed it. I was able to put a great deal of focus into something and get it done.

Pushing It

A few days passed after having done the 1,001 in one day. The challenge was still running, and I was still feeling good about it. Really good... in fact, I purposely skipped full days and I ended up racking up another 943 push-ups owed just 4 days after I had completed the 1,001. This time, it was already about 8:00pm and I was just starting my sets. I knocked out a few hundred, and then decided to kick it up a notch. I put on some old Yamakasi videos to watch, set my phone on the floor, and set up a 1-minute timer. For about an hour and a half, I was knocking out sets of 7-10 push-ups every single minute. You know what I realized? Minutes are quite short! However, my arms were still very accustomed to what they'd been being put through, and I wasn't failing on any of the reps. It wasn't until the last 101, when I decided to do all sets of 10 (except the last, which would be 11), that I nearly had my first failed rep. This time, when I finished, I was even more proud than the last time. Why? Because, this time I had done 1,001 push-ups in just under 4.5 hours.