50 To 50 To 50

Last night Romney reminded me that today began the 50 day countdown to my 50th birthday, which is going to encompass my entire 50th year. I knew this was coming as I’d had a lengthy discussion with Hans the other day as to why I wasn’t doing (postponing, more accurately) my planned challenge this year. But I hadn’t thought about 50 days to 50 and I should have, given that a decade ago 40 days to 40 was the one that really tipped the birthday challenge scale for me. So I guess 50 to 50 is a good place to start given that my 50th birthday challenge is going to incorporate the entire year, or 50 to 50 to 50; nuthin’ like nice round numbers as an excuse to concoct a good challenge.

So I’m up at 4:50 AM and commencing the challenge by writing and Tweeting. As soon as I finish this entry I’ll do 50 reps of some exercise to get it started. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s ahead:

The Big Challenge will happen on 11/11/11 and where I’ll “tie the room together” with an itinerary that pays homage to all of my California-based birthday challenges as I spend 50 hours roaming around Southern California via bikes, boots, and running shoes en route to 500 kilometers of riding, 50 kilometers of running, and leading 50 rock climbs 5.10 or harder.

The year will revolve around reversing the obesity epidemic and, hopefully, target childhood obesity a bit more than I’ve been able to given my job is writing diets and making exercise programs for adults. But even with my company’s success obesity rates are projected to be 75% of Americans by 2020. If we can get the kids we’ll get the parents, so I’d like to do more kid stuff this year.

Physiologically I want to convert power to endurance over the year. As my friends and The Straight Dope faithful know, an injury curtailed my endurance endeavors this year and I’ve been focused on training power and stability. Marcus (or Dr Marcus Elliott at P3) thinks it would be very interesting (he actually said impressive) if I could flip pure power to pure endurance over the course of a year, so that’s the goal. Challenges that revolve around one discipline only have always bored me somewhat, mainly because we understand those individual templates so well. My 40th was all about trying to do both. I’ve learned a lot since then so I’ll work with Marcus and see if we can find any scientific breakthroughs.

There will also be some challenges spread throughout the year, which I’ll announce on my actual birthday. The 50 days leading up to this are sort of a prep period to work on accountability and self improvement, so here’s what I’ll do:

50 new things . This is something cool a lot of other people have done on their birthday challenges. Each day I’ll try and do something new each day, be it eat, drink, learn, practice; so long as I’ve never done it precisely this way. I promise this won’t all be cocktails.

50 days of Twitter. I never Tweet but I’ll get in the habit by Tweeting my diet and exercise. Sure, this may be boring (certainly for me) but I’m asked constantly what I eat and what I do for exercise so, if you’re really interested, now all you have to do is follow me. Currently I'm doing a zig zag diet very similar to the Shakeology Cleanse.


pics: the crew during reed's challenge in 2000 and my crew today.