Challenge to All Travelers!

One of my goals with the blog this year is to help people be more active and work on fitness goals. As someone who never ran before 2006, I know enough about life before running and life after running to know about the improvements that running can make. There are so many positives from it that it continues to push me to work harder and harder at it. One of those positives was being able to help other people begin to run and improve their fitness. That prompted me to become a USATF-certified coach to learn more about the basics in helping people work out. Since I started running, I have had the privilige of helping many people start to walk or run to improve their health and fitness.

Which brings me to my –

Challenge to All Travelers!

Reason for the Challenge

This year, I will work harder than ever to help more runners run more races in more places for less. However, I also want to help those who already do travel a lot to start moving. When we look at our travel numbers for a given year, we find that we have covered a lot of miles. Some people cover far more than others (check out Ben’s mileage for 2013 – 406,000 miles!) It is really amazing to see how many miles we have gone!

However, those miles are almost always in planes, trains, and automobiles. It does absolutely nothing for our physical well-being to travel a ton of miles when we are sitting in a seat (no matter how comfortable!) for that travel. As much as I would like to think that traveling at speeds of several hundreds of miles per hour at 38,000 feet has some type of exercise effect on me, I know it doesn’t. 🙂 So, I know I need to cover some miles on my own two feet to help me stay in shape and be fit.

The Challenge

For 2014, I would like to challenge all of my fellow travelers to cover some miles with their feet instead of only relying on mechanical means to move us around. I am not talking about running to your next business meeting, of course. 🙂 What I am talking about is encouraging and helping everyone to start walking/running, or, if you are already, to increase the amount of walking/running that you are doing. This will help you on a variety of levels as studies have shown that walking/running can have the following positive effects:

• Increase heart health
• Increase blood flow
• Increase memory retention
• Increase flexibililty
• Decrease feelings of tiredness and exhaustion
• Decrease feelings of discouragement
• As well as many other things!

As a business person, something like memory retention is an incredibly valuable tool to have! To be able to enhance that should be a priority! As a parent, increasing heart health should be near the top of any list of personal desires. As a human being, decreasing the amount of tiredness you feeling in any given day should be something that is sought for!

My desire with this challenge is to help you to focus as much on miles put on your shoes as you do on miles you put in your frequent flyer accounts. Doing this will most definitely add to many aspects of your life that you had not before realized!

How The Challenge Will Work

It starts very easy – today, you will only have one thing to do. That is COMMIT TO THE CHALLENGE. This means that you are committing to add miles to your feet this year. That’s it! Each week, we will add various aspects and components to the challenge to help you in completing it, but for now, all you need to do is to be willing to challenge yourself to put miles on your feet.

I am not talking about having you commit to run a marathon in 2014 or to run 2,014 miles, or to win your local 5K. I am talking about something every person should be interested in – doing something that will help you to get in better shape and be more healthy. Our tool for accomplishing that will be by walking and/or running throughout the year.

Questions?

Do I have to sign up with you for this? Absolutely not! This is a challenge to provoke you to do the miles. It is not something to have you sign-up for – just to help you to do the miles.

Does it cost anything to do this challenge? Depends 🙂 It does not cost anything to sign-up for this challenge, but you may need to buy certain things to help you accomplish it – like walking/running shoes, maybe some sports apparel, etc.

What can I expect from the blog to help me with this? I will be dedicating at least one post each week to help you attain this challenge goal. These posts will have such information as: what shoes to choose, how to start walking/running, ways to keep focused, how to find time to walk/run while on busy trips, how to find decent places to walk/run, and much, much more!

Are there prizes? Yes, there will be prizes along the way. Some of them may be performance prizes while some of them will be giveaways designed to help you continue in the challenge. Yet more prizes will be given to those readers who help other travelers start pushing towards The Challenge.

What does this have to do with travel? I have done quite a bit of travel and stayed in many hotels – I know that some of the people who find it the hardest to perform any exercises are the people who are traveling all the time. This challenge is for everyone to move more, but is especially focused toward the traveler to make the time to walk/run to better their health and life. My desire is that those who commit to the challenge will find that the adding of walking or running to their routine will fit perfectly with their travel life and further enhance it.

What if I already run? Does this apply to me as well? Absolutely! The goal with The Challenge is to encourage everyone to move more. If you are a runner and ran 1,000 miles last year, challenge yourself to run 1,100 this year! These posts will be able to help anyone who just wants to move more.

Any other questions or comments? Feel free to leave them below or contact me at charlie@runningwithmiles.com. Let’s get working on being healthier and more active in 2014!