Challenges

Some of my sparkfriends are doing challenges right now. To be honest, some of them are always doing challenges. I assume that these challenges encourage these people to stay on plan. Due to this, a few of my friends are having amazing results. I'm really happy for them. They are obviously the type of people who benefit from this kind of formal challenge.

I have tried a few challenges myself and almost all of them, but one, didn't work well for me. To be honest, they were Epic Fails. I'm not totally sure why but I do feel that many of them are designed for someone like me to fail. I'm stubborn, lazy, incorrigible but I do have a list of semi-valid excuses that I use effectively.

In one of the first challenges it seemed that when I joined I was immediately inundated with 5000 emails of all kinds - welcome to the team, 3000 body measurements to take, 500 questions to answer, 60 pages of requirements, 24/7 schedules, hourly check ins, emojis, motivational quotes, etc. I hadn't even gotten though the first batch when I downloaded hundreds more, the gist of which were..........

" Just checking on you! We miss you on the team?" ...........jeez, I haven't even been on the team an hour yet!!!!

"Just wanted to say 'Groovy, Baby, groovy!'"................. WTH?

"Go, Alizarin Crimson-Halfwits!!!"..........
.......... Kill me now.

"It's 5 Am. and I just ran 40 miles through downtown St. Louis, covered in sweat, dodging bullets, weaving in and out of semis, in the dark!!! Goal me!!!! Tell me about what you have done??? " ............ A.........5A.M?...............
....Let's see. I farted and turned over in bed.

It's no wonder that I immediately felt overwhelmed as I thought I was looking at a 14 hour a day job. I was afraid one of the Alizarin Crimson-Halfwits would jump through my window wearing camo and scream, "Get up, you Filthy Ho!!!" It was no time at all before I quit and I felt really guilty about it. My bad for not checking into what this entailed.

I was shell shocked for a while after that first challenge.................for years in fact. Eventually my wounds healed and I forgot what it was like to "give birth to quints". I tried some simpler challenges that didn't seem like they would suck the life out of me but they did. I proved that I could also be a weenie at those too. Some of the "homework" was not going to work for me. They were designed by vested interests to get you to buy a certain product. "Your challenge today is to consume 30 gallons of plain Reeky Stinky brand Greek yogurt...................Yuck. When you have celiac disease, like I do, you can't eat the equivalent of a 6 loaves of bread or 20 boxes of cereal a day without your backside ending up permanently adhered to a commode. So I had to skip a lot of the daily requirements,"The challenge today is stupid. No can do!!" I kind of felt like I was a fraud. Some of the challenges were really silly for me specifically - suggesting that I get 8 hours of sleep a night. I love to sleep and would sleep 8 hours every single night forever if I could but it's not that easy. Heck, I might even go for 20 hours a day but I've not figured out, as yet, how I can force myself to sleep.

I was fairly lame at creating SMART goals so a helpful team "psychiatrist" would offer to help me, aka beat me into submission. Their goals for me were usually unrealistic things, like lose 40 pounds in a week. I pointed out that I was going to have to remove all my extremities and internal organs to accomplish that. They pointed out that ,"You are poorly motivated."

In some of the challenges people are encouraged to blog every day to make themselves accountable. To me this is the equivalent of having a daily colonoscopy. The bloggers list their goals and confess every day if they met them. For someone like me, if I commit to something like this I'm going to have to do it no matter what. To do otherwise is admitting I am, basically, insane.

Day 1 - Epic Fail. Day 2 - Epic Fail. Day 3 - Epic Fail. Day 45 - Epic Fail. Day 677 - Epic Fail.

Some of my friend are like me and when this happens they slink off and hide. Others are like, "Yep, I'm an unmotivated piece of ----. Whatever. What of it. Ungoal me!" After day 677 you have a hard time thinking up a motivating comment to say to them on their blog. "Don't give up" doesn't seem quite right, does it? So I find myself wanting to say. "Groovy, Baby, Groovy" which translated means, "Good grief. You suck!"

If at some point if you see me say that I'm thinking of doing a challenge, you can assume that I am having some kind of cerebrovascular incident. Call a veterinarian and refer me to this blog. I probably have Distemper.