Challenge 2.0 – The Summary and The Challenge 23

Long time no see I would say. The last weeks were really busy and chaotic and I haven’t had the time and silence to write blogposts. Even tho it is still busy I want to try to blog more often again from now on especially because I have a new Challenge for you (or rather for me).

But before that, you for sure want to know what happened to my old Challenge 2.0. I bet you are curious if I managed to run the “dm Frauenlauf”. So what can I say… I did! I have a picture of me in the pretty running shirt we got with my finisher medal to prove:

I ran all the way and didn’t have to stop or walk in between and with a time of 0:37:15,9 I was still slow but about 3 min. faster than I thought I would be. I didn’t manage to do my two bonus goals that were

a) be in the first 1000 of my age range (I was 1106th) and

b) finish the run faster than the fastest nordic walker (she had a time of 35 Min. and something – how did she do that??!)

but I am still proud of myself that I tryed and finished it!

So I talked about a new Challenge already, now it’s time to specify it. Today I realised that I have only 23 days left until the first of three conventions, I want to attend, starts. As my cosplays will be with a bare midriff (at least 2 of them) I need to do a lot of sports until then to make my belly flat and showable. No, I don’t want to lose weight or something like that but I don’t want to show my belly the way it is, so I need to change it.

My Battleplan for the next 23 Days looks like this:

1. Do sport as often as possible, best case every day. An option would be one day running or swimming (especially because summer and 30° C finally arrived here!) and the next day sports active and so on.

2. Do belly exercises (again) as often as possible, best case also every day.

3. Eat as healthy as possible what means:

- as much vegetables and fruit as possible

- as little chocolate, cookies, fastfood and bad fat in general as possible

- trying to eat carbohydrates not to late in the day (maybe before 6 in the evening?)

- start again with drinking 1,5 litres of water a day(or more if it’s hot)

But that’s not all I have to do to prepair for the first convention. I also need to finish my Cosplays what means that I still have a lot of work ahead of me. I will keep you updated with my improvements.

Today’s Summary:

Sport & Nutrition:

3,25 km of running

~ 3 km of walking

decided for the stairs instead of the elevator: 2 times (upwards, I hardly ever use the elevator downwards)

Cosplays:

Didn’t do anything today. I’m not revealing what characters it will be already. You will have to stay tuned to find out.

Percentage of completion:

Cosplay 1: 40% done

Cosplay 2: 10% done

Cosplay 3: not decided for one yet

Other things to be done this week:

finish reading The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

write a Treatment

write a paper about the movie Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

buy shoes (woho so looking forward to that!)

 

Ok, that’s it for today. It got a long but hopefully not boring post. See you soon (hopefully tomorrow) with a new update.

Challenge 2.0, Day 17 – The Peter Pan Presentation

Day 17 of Challenge 2.0 was halfway filled with Pan(ic). I got up in the morning and revised the stuff for my presentation. First I felt ok but the closer it came the more I turned into a nervous wreck. When we sat in the classroom waiting for the teacher to come in I was close to hyperventilating. But when he arrived and started talking, this suddenly disappeared. I have no idea why. This worried me even more because it felt like my brain shut down. I feared that I wasn’t remembering anything of what I wanted to say.

But then it was our turn and my two mates spoke their parts first and then it was my turn. Personally I thought that I just said nonsense but everyone else was telling me afterwards that it was  fine. It was a big relief when it was over. But now I am kind of looking forward to the paper we have to write in the end about it as the topic cought me and I want to find out more about it.

In the afternoon I didn’t do a lot except watching videos on Youtube and stuff. I also found a Song there that was (and still is) stuck in my head. Also I like the video and the singer is so cute. I love her. Besides she is a geek too <3. She likes Comics and plays World of Warcraft (Yes, I know. A few of you will hate me or her now, but I don’t mind). Here is the video so that you can see what I am talking about:

Other than that I decided for a topic for Algorithms and Data Structures today. I’ll have a test about that next week. After I chose it, I looked at the lecture material and the incredible happened. I understood my topic! Woho! I’m really proud of myself. In case you are interested, the topic I chose is “extendible hashing with selection sort”.

Additionally I was glad that I registered for the Women’s run already some time ago because today I got an email that it’s sold out! 21.100 Women registered for it! That’s a new record and it happened much quicker than anybody expected. I’m excited!

Tomorrow two girls will come to see the room we soon have available for rent. I’m curious about them. If you are looking for a room in a shared flat or know someone who does you can contact me anytime. I’ll tell you tomorrow how it went. So check back on Day 18!

Picture by Ethan Hein

Challenge 2.0, Day 10 – The Addiction Development

Challenge 2.0 Day 10. I’m in the two-digits, woho! .  Today morning I tried to write that homework I spoke about yesterday again and I managed to get something on paper. I wouldn’t say it’s good but at least I had something to hand hin.

When I went home I got some fresh vegetables from the grocery store and cooked a delicious meal with vegetables and fish and egg noodles. Yummie! I’m gonna make something like that more often.

In the evening I went to another class (algorithms and data structures – for the geeks among us) where I found a little hope that I understood what I am supposed to do later in the semester. That feels good. Just not sure how well it really will turn out in the end.

When I was back home I did todays Sports Active Workout which included Belly exercises already. After that I found something on the web that made me think that I might be developing a new addiction at the moment. The thing I found was the Vampire Series Challenge. One more Reading Challenge. To make the long story short – yes, I joined. I must be crazy. I think I’m addicted to Reading Challenges. But this one is soo awesome so I HAD to join. Is there a group for anonymous reading challenge addicts anywhere?

Other than that I saw a few joggers when I went to the last class and felt a bit guilty that I wasn’t running. But we also have really bad, rainy weather at the moment. Someone told me today, that it is going to be better at the end of the week. Then I’ll go running, I promise (to myself).

At the end of the day I played a few hands at Poker on Facebook with a friend. That was fun.

Ok, it’s late already (again) and I am tired, so I say Goodbye for today. See you at Day 11.

Picture by rick

Challenge 2.0, Day 4 – The White Jacket

Day 4 of Challenge 2.0 already. Time flies by when you have to do a lot and today I did a lot. In the morning a friend of mine came to visit. He needed help for his cosplay costume. So we first went to a shop that sells art supplies to buy a few things he needed to finish the costume. Then we had lunch at an italian restaurant that is one of my favourites. Everything is sooo delicious there. (For everyone in my area: Vapiano is highly recommended!)

After that we went back home, I had a short geek-break aka I played a short round of CS with some friends and then we packed all the stuff we needed and headed to the studio. First because I had to work there today and second because we had space and a sewing machine and stuff to work on the costume what was a white suit jacket (as seen in the work in progress picture). We didn’t finish it and finished a lot less than we hoped but at least the most difficult parts are done now, hopefully my friend will succeed in doing the rest. He has busy days ahead of him as the convention where he want’s to wear it is this weekend already!

In the evening I went home and read a few other blogs of people doing Life Lists and found some interesting stuff and motivation. Also I remembered some more items for my own Life List so I updated it a bit today. After that I was hungry but it also was late already so I was looking for something to eat but didn’t really want to cook anymore. I was tempted to just eat some cookies (as I am allowed again) but then decided for a soup with pasta and vegetables. I’m proud that I took the better option even tho the cookies would have been the faster and easier one.

As I mentioned yesterday, it is a Sports Active Breakday today so I didn’t do any but I’ll do my belly exercises right after I finished this post. At the moment I have 3 active things (actually 4 but one is the result of one of the others) on my Life List . They were for today:

1. Drink 1.5 Liters of Water: done
2. Do belly exercises: right after this post
3. Blogpost: obviously done

That means, my day is completed and I can head to bed now (a little too late again *sigh*). See you at Day 5.

Challenge 2.0, Day 1 – The New Challenge

So I started today with eating a crunchy chocolate muesli . Earlier I finally tried the Mini-Mozartkugeln I intended to try a month ago already. Just ate a few of them and very slowly. They are delicious. But I ate Salad too today, I want to keep up with that even tho the Challenge is over. Ok, this might have been the last time I am talking about chocolate (no promises about that, but I’ll try to not mention it too often).

Talking about the Challenge brings up my next thing I wanted to tell you. I gave you hints already the last few days that I am going to do a new Challenge now that the old one is over. It was fun doin it and it surprised me a lot of what I am able to. So today is Day one of Challenge 2.0 (the geek in me decided for that title). You might want to know now what this new Challenge is all about. No, it’s not about chocolate again. This time it’s about Sport. Not only Sport in general, I have an actual goal I want to reach.

On May 30th there is this running event. It’s called “dm Frauenlauf” (dm Women’s Run). There are two distances to choose from – 5 and 10 km. I’m not brave enough for the 10 km for my first run I want to do, so I decided for the 5 km. This will be hard enough for me anyway. So I’ll try to do Sport at least 5 times a week from now on. Either running or Sports Active or something else that comes my way. I am open for suggestions if you have any for me. I’d also love it, if you want to join anything of that. I know already of two of my friends who want to participate in the run too, so you are welcome to join. For the run there are of course only girls allowed but for the training everyone can join me. The more the better – more people, more fun. Today I already did some Sports Active to start well with the Challenge, I hope it’s not going to be too screwed up when Uni starts again. We will see.

There is one more thing I want to start today. Some kind of a Life List. I’m not totally sure if it’s going to be a 101 in 1001 (101 things in 1001 days) or a general Life List or a mix of both. Probably the last option. I’ll decide that right after I finished this post. Then I’m going to work on the List and put it online. One thing that is sure already, is that the participation in the run will be one thing on the list to be crossed off. Feel free to join me with that too (or help me reach one of the things on my list).

Do you have any suggestions for me? Support? Do you want to join? Drop me a line in the comments!

Happy Easter to all of you and see you tomorrow with Day 2! (wow, that feels a bit like a time warp to suddenly be back at Day 1)

Picture by magnetbox

Challenge Day 37 – The Fast food experience

Challenge Day 37, 9 Days to go. Wow. “It’s the final countdoooown” *sing*. Oh, sorry I got distracted.

So today I managed to do something pretty cool. I went to McDonalds with a friend of mine (no, that’s not the cool part) and ate a full meal there that was healthy! Ok, most of it. I did eat a Veggie Burger but I also ate a Salad, drank Sparkling water and had a fruit bag for desert! I counted the kcal in the end and got 505 kcal total! (400-something was already the burger). Normally I don’t count kcal as I don’t have to but today I was curious about it. I think thats pretty nice for a visit to a fast food restaurant.

After that I burned a lot of kcal already while doing a shopping marathon with the same friend to help find him white trousers for his next cosplay costume. After a lot of stores we finally succeeded! It still was exhausting.

Then I went to a class in the evening (the hardcore one I told you about already I think) and saw a light at the end of the tunnel. No, I didn’t die or so, I just finally have the hope to be able to talk about the short film I have to give a presentation about for at least a few minutes (until before the class I thought I might manage to do about 30 seconds, so this is already a big improvement) In all the presentation should be 15 minutes in the and so I hope I have a good partner for that presentation and we’ll find some more to talk about till then.

When I was home I cooked dinner and ate cucumbers with it, again no chocolate today. Afterwards I was tired and stuffed of food but after a while I still motivated myself to do Sports Active and the additional belly exercises even tho my belly and my bum still hurt from yesterday’s workout. So I’m proud of myself that I still did it even with all the points speaking against it!

Now it’s late and I have to get up early tomorrow and it is going to be a busy day again so see you tomorrow with Day 38!

Maybe you wanna tell me how your Challenge goes? Any problems or excitement? Leave me a comment!

Picture by Perfecto Insecto

Challenge Day 36 – The Sport Resumption

Day 36 of my Challenge already. Wow, an end is in sight! At the same time it was a new beginning today. You might already have asked yourself why I didn’t write about  my Sports Active activities. This has a pretty good reason: there weren’t any! Because of that I felt guilty and tried to hide it by not mentioning it. That’s kind of childish, isn’t it?

But today I did a fresh new Sports Active workout and I’m proud of it. I also still feel a bit of it in my legs, that feels good! Reminds me, that I have done something. Maybe you remember, that I wrote, that there aren’t really any exercises for the belly in these workouts, so I browsed through youtube today and found accidentally some exercises for that and immediately had to try them. You can watch, what I did in addition to the Workout here:

There is nothing really special about that, just more or less basic stuff but it made me confident about being able to do it, so i tryed and finished and my belly is still feeling it! .

Besides I found another site today that really motivated me. You can find it here. I didn’t dare to try one of this girl’s workouts as they look really badass. Also I really admire her shape, but her sixpack is a bit too much for me. It’s not what I’m aiming for, but it really motivated me especially because all of her workouts can be done at home with hardly any equipment (and the little she uses might be exchangeable with something else if you are a little creative).

Another thing that happened today was, that a friend of mine told me, that he will start going to the gym on friday again and I was thinking that it would be nice to just hop on a stepper or a bike and do some cardio and stuff. But as soon as he told me how much I would have to pay for the gym membership I knew I would stick another while just with my Sports Active. Maybe I should really try to start jogging even tho I have some kind of trauma from my teenage days about that. We will see.

Speaking of Sports Active I have to tell you something else I found out today. Something really exciting (for me). First, there is an expansion for Sports Active with new exercises AND with *drumroll* Belly exercises! Also some warm-up and cooldown exercises and stretching. I want that! But this is expensive too, so I better do my version for a while longer and see if I really stick to it and “deserve” it.

The Second thing I found out about Sports Active today is, that there will be a Sports Active 2.0 (that’s just the working title at the moment) out in Autum – including a Heart rate monitor! Pure Excitement for a Geek like me! . I’m really looking forward to that.

Ok, that’s it for today. Regarding my Challenge I had again no chocolate (this starts to get boring already, maybe I should eat some just to make the blog more exciting! ) but some vegetable today.

In case you want to be a Sponsor for my gym membership or my Sports Active upgrade send me a message . (I could wear a t-shirt with the sponsor’s Name/Homepage everytime I hit the gym )

Wow, that seems to be a long Post today. Thank you, if you read until here – you are free now . See you tomorrow with Day 37.

Picture by lululemon athletica

Challenge Day 31 – The Excitement

Day 31 of my Challenge was pretty exciting. After I got up early to go to my script writing class (where I presented my idea for the script I’m going to write – it will involve some ego-shooter-geekness) I went back home and directly went to a shop to get me a new phone – FINALLY. Nothing of my old phone was working properly anymore. So I got me a neat new phone (a Nokia 5230), it’s not the supernewest existing, but it was cheap and I like it, and it still can do so much more than my old phone could (even when it was brand new). I already checked out some of the apps that exist for it and found a nice fitness app. It tracks the distance and the movementspeed of you when started. That’s nice for running for example. I want to try to keep track of how much I walk during a day.

The other exciting thing happened after my second class today (it was about comics & migration) because then I went to the Dschungel theatre with a good friend of mine and we watched “hoods”. It’s an australian production (yes, australian.. the country that is always mistaken with the one I live in) and was for young people and in english. First I didn’t know that it will be in english and when I heard it I was even more excited about it. I really want to try to go to the theatre more often – and find someone who goes with me.

Eating wise was a bad day today. No, I didn’t eat chocolate, but as it was pretty stressy all day and I also was distracted by my new toy (the phone!) I somehow forget about the food and just could pick me up a sandwich from the grocery store that has a lot of stuff in it I rather don’t wanna know exactly what it is. And after the theatre I was hungry already when I went home but I still didn’t manage to eat anything. I might make me a soup or so, anything else would be too much already and I wouldn’t sleep well. And I have to go soon because first I’m tired already and second I have class tomorrow morning at 11:00 (at least not THAT early).

So that’s all about my exciting day. See you tomorrow with day 32.

Picture by viernest

Challenge Day 28 – The Cake

At Day 28 of my Challenge I haven’t had to get up that early so I could catch up with the amount of sleep I missed yesterday. That was nice! Around noon I went to two classes, one of them was the first time this week as it was cancelled the last two weeks and it happened the first time, that there were more topics for presentations that I wanted to do than that I didn’t. The decision was hard but in the end I made it and I’m looking forward to all the other presentations, they must be really interesting – hopefully.

Then I was home for a few hours, had lunch and stuff (no chocolate) and in the evening I had one more class – this semesters geek-class of mine – Algorithms and Data structure. Today we learned some more about what we need to know to be able to code our final project in the end.

When I came home, my mates were home and they brought a soooo delicious looking cake with them. I tried not to look at it too closely but I saw that there was a HUGE amount of chocolate in it. OMG it was sooo hard to say no when my mate offered me a piece but I did it!! I am so proud of myself.

In the evening I did some more geeky stuff – playing a game with my friends online, and I watched two episodes of “The biggest loser” (and ate dinner during that – is that mean? ).

That’s it already for today. See you at day 29 (wow, nearly done with the 20s!).

P.S. It’s hard to choose a picture of chocolate cake out of loads of pictures of chocolate cake!

Picture by Puck777

Challenge Day 27 – The Insomnia

Day 27 of my Challenge started pretty early – at 7:15 to be precise. It was even worse because first I went to bed at about 2 in the morning yesterday (as I wasn’t very tired in the evening and got distracted by a friend) and couldn’t sleep very well. I kept waking up and mostly I didn’t know why. Probably it was because it was really windy outside and this resulted in noise. Second thing was, that at about 3:30 in the morning a thunderstorm happened to be with REALLY loud thunder that woke me at least twice. Not a good basis for a good morning. But I still got up and went to Uni. It helped that it was a pretty interesting class about britains history.

After that I went home, had lunch (with salad) and a little online-game with friends (Geek alert!) and then had a little nap before I headed to the next class. This class was about a boring topic but the teacher made it interesting (besides, that’s the reason I’m even in that class). Normally it happens more often that the teacher makes interesting stuff boring so that’s a good alternation.

When I was home from Uni I ate dinner, again with a big bowl of salad and cucumber (Om nom nom, delicious!) and again no chocolate for me today.

Last week I had to do a little homework that decided if I’m allowed to attend another class or not. Yesterday I got the info that I’m not allowed to. It would have been an interesting class but can’t change it anymore now. At least I can sleep longer tomorrow because of that now .

Besides, I decided today, that I have to look for a new phone REALLY urgently as the battery runs out of energy really rapidly already and on Saturday there broke a part of the casing away. I even found a phone now that isn’t too expensive and I would wanna have I just can’t decide if I should stay with my provider or get me a new one. In general I’m ok with the one I have now, it just has one thing I really don’t like, so I think of changing – but every other provider I looked up so far is either much more expensive (and provides less for that) or doesn’t have the phone I want (or decent other options). Any suggestions? Are you satisfied with your provider or your phone? Or you can tell me what I should not get? For that I have to tell you that I only had Nokia phones so far and rather would wanna stick with that in the future.

Ok, that’s it for today. Come back tomorrow for Day 28!

Picture by aussiegall