Since I joined the Tampa CrossBoot fitness group back in December, I've done a lot of things that were previously outside of my comfort zone. But I've also seen and felt a lot of results. One of the more recent endeavors I've undertaken with this group is the weekly fitness at-home challenge. The purpose of the challenge is to encourage members to work beyond their limits, keep a fitness commitment, and enter to win a prize.  The first challenge was presented by one of the group organizers, Whit, in her Fitnasty newsletter. The challenge was to do 100 air squats (a squat without holding any weight) per day for seven consecutive days. I felt confident I could do that, even if I had to break up the 100 into two sets of 50 throughout the day, so I began. This challenge went by without too much difficulty; the most difficult part was remembering to do them. In fact, I even had to squeeze in 50 squats at a friend's party when I realized midnight was approaching and I h...

This post is embarrassingly late--even for me, but for the sake of finishing things, here is my race report from the Gasparilla Distance Classic weekend. When I posted my running-related resolutions earlier this year, I noted that I wanted to volunteer at a race. So I signed up to help on the first day of races, Saturday. The races for this day included a 15K and a 5K. I knew quite a few friends who would be finishing both of these races, so I decided to volunteer handing out medals to finishers. As an individual volunteer, I realized I was quite the oddball, as most volunteers in this section were groups of high school students fulfilling community service requirements. If I thought I was tolerant of teenage group behaviors, I overestimated myself. These kids were not runners, and most of them didn't understand what events were actually taking place. One kid asked me, "So what does this walk benefit, anyway?" Other kids were flinging the medals around while we waited...