In just under two weeks I will be taking part in my first training sessions to row around the Isle of Wight. On Sunday when I originally intended to write this, I would have had exactly two weeks to get fit. That’s not long, not long at all, but good old Google tells me that it is possible and there are around 25,000,000 web pages to tell me all about it! Given the short timeframes involved I will skip past my usual procrastination stage and not attempt to read them all. Interestingly there are far less hits for getting fit in 12 days, so its a good thing I have already started my exercise!

Now that the first training date is nearly upon us, it all seems a bit daft. Why are we going rowing in February? And why have I left it to the last minute to start exercising regularly? Its not even like I woke up today (or Sunday!) with a lightning bolt realisation that I was going rowing in two weeks, oh no, amazingly I actually planned it this way as life was busy getting in the way up until now. I’m not completely crazy, I have been exercising on and off but definitely not the 7 days a week, often at the crack of dawn type training that ‘real’ rowers like to partake in. I’m not planning on doing that, but I definitely need to step it up a bit, and when I say a bit I actually mean a lot (I’m just trying to ease my mind into the idea gently!).

It’s just over three months until the main event when I and 7 fellow crew mates will row around the Island. So whilst getting fit enough to fool the rowing coach in two weeks is pretty optimistic, getting ‘rowing around an island’ fit in three months does seems a bit more reasonable. It may just be the wonderful power of time stretching out ahead of me. I can pretty much guarantee that I will look back on these words in three months time and wonder what on earth I was thinking! But if nothing else as well as being painful this first training session should give me a good hard shock and push in the right direction. And then will follow two and a half months of frenzied fitness and rowing practise… I hope…watch this space!

The 22nd of February is definitely not a great day for our first training session, it will most likely be cold and wet and despite my best intentions on my get fit quick campaign I will not be as fit as I should be. BUT the 22nd of February will come, we will do our first training session and we will be one step closer to rowing around an Island!

So if you have set yourself a challenge and are struggling to make progress or are thinking about doing a challenge but are not getting much beyond the thinking about it why not put a date in the diary? Make it a hard and fast date, one you are not allowed to break with a ‘the dog ate my homework’ type excuse! Chances are you won’t be ready, but chances are that just by committing to that date you will be successful anyway.