Olivia Eburne 2/17/14

One of the three personal goals that I have set for myself is to do more cardio work outside of the dojo. I have chosen this goal because I feel that I am sorely lacking in the cardio department, and I want to become better at it. Also, if there was a zombie apocalypse, I just know that I wouldn’t be able to outrun them for long. So I’ve challenged myself to find good cardio that I can do in the house or in our neighborhood and try to build it into my schedule. I already do a bit of cardio. When I can, I ride my bike to and from school, although that’s not the whole way because of Morses pond being in the way. We  keep our bikes at a friends house and go to and from there, so I can’t just go biking any time that I want. 

I like to work with what the season gives me, so this time of year it’s either skating or skiing.  We had an awesome rink earlier in the year and there were a few days when the whole pond was skatable. I also had a couple days where I skated to school, which really involves skating across the pond and being picked up on the other side for the rest of the ride to school.

The other thing about pond skating is that you can get good exercise two ways: Skating, and clearing the rink.  This makes it more interesting than other cardio, where you have to do only one thing for forever.

We had to bag on maintaining the rink because we couldn’t clear it fast enough to avoid the dreaded water-seeping-into-snow-slush-bumpy-ice factor.  So now I’m doing cross-country skiing. I try to keep a ski loop maintained on the cove in our backyard, but we also go out around the pond too. It’s really good whole-body exercise. I want to cross-country ski to school as well, and unlike skating I could probably ski the whole way. In fact, I have a goal where I want to get to school without using a car 30 days out of the year, which involves a combination of exercise—either boating across and then biking, or skiing the whole way, or skating. I think I’m at about 10 right now.

So what do you guys do for cardio?  And how do you make yourself do it when you don’t feel like it?

Also, when Maisy was running workout programs, that was good, because we were doing things as a team, and it was more the point of the mastery program--Working together towards one common goal. How can we get back to that?