Today was a fun day. About a week ago, I spoke to a reporter for Techinsider (owned by Business Insider) about the Rock’ing for 30 Days Challenge. Early this morning the story was finally posted. You can read it here:

May have made my head look a bit misshapen, but cool to be shown with The Rock (credit: Techinsider)

May have made my head look a bit misshapen, but cool to be shown with The Rock (credit: Techinsider)

This dad is spending an entire month eating like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson

The story was great to read. I thought they did a solid job summarizing what a typical day looks like for me while doing this challenge. I shared this on Facebook and Twitter, which led to a lot of friends, former co-workers, and random people I’ve never met sharing words of encouragement and sharing the story with others. It was very motivating to see the reaction.

Might as well share this on reddit…

I have been a fairly active user of reddit for around 8 years. During the past two+ years, as I’ve worked to get myself into shape, I have also been a frequent visitor to the Fitness subreddit. So I decided to continue the fun and post details about what I’m doing on reddit.

I’m eating and training like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for 30 Days, and just made it half-way through (37/M/6’3”/207lbs). Here’s my lessons learned so far.

The reaction blew me away. The post exploded in popularity, and made it to the front page of reddit (no small feat). As the comments poured in, I responded to each and every one of them. Finding myself at the center of a popular discussion within a community I’ve been a part of for so long, I felt a responsibility to be a good citizen and reply to everyone. It took most of my day, but it was worth it. Of course, it also led me to promise that I’d share photos at the end of this challenge. Posting shirtless selfies on the Internet seems like a bad idea, but I’ll figure out something.

“You’re wasting your time…”

The vast majority of the responses I’ve received were supportive and encouraging, with a small percentage being typical online haters. Fitness can be as personal and hotly debated as religion or politics. Many people chimed in with suggestions about what I should be doing instead, and modifications I should make to the workout. I’m not sure the whole idea of the challenge, that I wanted to see if I could do exactly what The Rock does for 30 days, came through to some people.

There are people who take differing views on fitness and nutrition as an attack on them personally. I’ll probably do a whole separate post just about this topic once the challenge is over.

Daily Stats

The elliptical is hard to really get high intensity out of. I’m debating mixing in some running into the cardio.

stats-day18