Biggest Loser Challenge

The challenge has started. I don't think I've ever seen so many women at the gym. It's good to see that people were keen to be involved.

I've ended up on the black team, and Krissi is my trainer. We're getting together as a group on Saturday morning. A spin class followed by a walk around Lake Burley Griffin. Should be fun.

Basically, the challenge works as follows: You get points for different activities - some activities are worth more than others. You get 100 points for every cm you lose, 50 pts for attending your personal training or slim sessions, 35 points for a cycle class or a Biggest Loser group fitness class, and 25 points for all other sorts of classes / workouts.

Today I ran on the treadmill and had my personal training session so I earned 75 points. I was also booked in to get weighed and measured. Hopefully I'll be seeing those numbers head down soon.

My treadmill run was 15 mins of interval running. I was running along, doing it easily, thinking that it was great that nowadays a 15 min interval run was a warmup .. when I started, getting to 15 mins was a miracle!

During my p/t session, we worked on a new program. It looks like it will be challenging. I strained my knee a little doing the Smith Machine squats .. so will have to be careful when doing them in future. I like doing those. Leanne, my trainer, is really inspiring. She's the one who got me running outside in public. I had visions of people standing, pointing and laughing, and the pavement cracking open as my feet hit it. Running outside is not nearly as embarrassing as I thought it would be.

We're going running for our next session, so we're alternating our sessions between Monday nights and Tuesday mornings. We'll only do that until it starts to get cold here in Canberra. I've been feeling a little nervous about going running again with Leanne, because I haven't been doing a lot of running. Now that I'm back into it I should be fine. I tend to go a little faster when I run with Leanne .. must be a pride thing. It means I struggle with my breathing sooner, so I'm trying very hard to take it a little slower when I start off. I want to run for the whole session rather than collapsing in a heap half way through.

It was interesting talking to the slimplicity coach. She asked me how much weight I wanted to lose in the 12 weeks, and then suggested I aim for a lower figure. It was easier to agree with her than to try to explain that I knew what I was aiming for. I was really disappointed in the slim sessions when I went to them before, so I should have expected that it wouldn't be a great experience. Still, I can survive them, and being weighed and measured is great for keeping on track. What I'm going to aim for is an average weight loss of 1 kg per week. We'll see how it goes.

My other goal is to get to the gym twice a day on weekdays, and on weekends when I'm in Canberra. It will be a real challenge to fit all those gym visits in, but I'm going to see if I can make it work.