Awesome class this morning guys, thanks for the feedback, I didn’t think you would all love the running that much, I will have to incorporate more running interval challenges!

As you all know, Fitta Bodies has had a team in the Oxfam Trailwalker for the last 2 years and we have another team ready to go this year.

Kirsty, Kelly and Christie will be forming a team and being joined by one of Kirsty’s friends to make up the 4.
They will be doing training walks on weekends leading up to the event in August, so if anyone is keen to join them, it would be a great way to get some more exercise into your week, you can enjoy the beautiful bushland around Sydney and help keep the girls motivated. Let me know if you would like to join them and I will hook you up.

But, let’s not forget this is a charity event and trust me, it is worth every penny you donate. Walking 100km’s through the bush is no mean feat, I did it in 2008 and I can vouch for how hard it is!

So, below is the blurb from Kirsty and Oxfam:

Hey all,

I am taking part in Oxfam TRAILWALKER Sydney 2010.

Thanks J

Totally unrelated to fitness or health, I am just totally blown away by the talent this girl has. The video goes for about 8 minutes, but I highly recommend taking the time to watch it, absolutely awesome.

Click here to watch the video

This video shows the winner of 2009’s ” Ukraine ’s Got Talent”, Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about $75,000.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears..

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine , resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

An art critic said:

“I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there’s surely no bigger compliment.”

Click here to watch the video

Thanks to everyone who participated in the sugar free charity event to raise money for Haiti.

Our grand total was $1164

Awesome effort everyone!

It was bad enough when McDonalds joined forces with weight watchers about a month ago, but now they are advertising on radio for their special dinner boxes.

This is the quote that their wonderful overpaid marketing department has come up with “We’ll take care of dinner tonight. Grab a value dinner, tuck in and let the stories begin” This is accompanied by the picture of 4 cokes, 4 fries, 2 big macs, 2 cheeseburgers and a pile of chicken nuggets. mmmm nutritious and delicious.

How about they use mine instead “We’ll take care of dinner tonight. Grab a value dinner, tuck in, get really fat and have a coronary heart attack”. Too simple I know, but I should refrain from what I really want to say.

I am still astounded every time I hear the obvious proclaimed as up to the minute news. The latest thing they are shouting about is that there is as much sugar in kids juices as what there is in soft drink. Who didn’t already know this? Is this really news?

We all need to take notice of what is in our foods and especially what is in our kids food because fat kids become fat adults. If you are reading this and you are overweight, I want to ask you, are your kids overweight also?

Childhood obesity is a major major problem for many reasons.

Firstly, overweight children get teased and bullied. It is unfortunate to say because nobody should be teased or bullied, but it does happen. Is that what you want for your child?

Overweight children will most likely develop eating disorders as they get older.

Overweight children will probably become overweight adults.

Do you struggle with your weight? Are you unhappy with your appearance? Are you constantly looking for the quick fix to lose weight? Would you wish this same fate upon your young loved ones? Do them a favour and educate them early how to eat healthily.

It’s Easter time, hip hip hooray! I’m no expert, but I am fairly sure Easter is not entirely about chocolate…

I think Easter eggs and Hot cross buns started making their way into the supermarkets not long after Christmas and the campaign to make us all fat with chocolate really gained momentum in the last month or so.

I will be the first person to say how appealing those beautifully wrapped shiny bunny rabbits and eggs look. It takes a lot of willpower not to buy one and smash into it straight away. It’s just not right, we are a big fat obese nation! You only need to go to a shopping centre to see that for yourself!

Like I said earlier, it is up to us what goes in our mouths, but it is hard to fight temptation all the time. If it is hard for me to resist and I am super conscious about what goes into my mouth, what is is like for someone who is overweight and just cannot resist the sight of those very cleverly designed and marketed Easter goodies.

I just wish the authorities would get it and do something good for this nation, other than the 1 ad on TV which is now getting old. We all got inspired by the guy walking along getting fat and then changing his life and getting thin again, it is a great ad, but we’ve seen that one, it made it’s mark, it did it’s job and now we need more. We need more than 1 ad when we are constantly bombarded with junk food everywhere we go.

I walked into the local shopping centre the other day and this is the first thing I see as I walk in. It goes for about 15 metres. What chance do parents have, the kids are just going to be begging for some of the sweet treats and I know I have had this conversation with friends of mine, when we went to school you would be hard pressed to find one overweight kid. Now it is about 1 in 10….

There is something you can do to fight back. Don’t eat any Easter eggs until Easter. There is absolutely no excuse for eating any easters products now! If you wait until Easter, it is very limited as to what you can devour, but if you have already started, I shudder to think how much you will consume unnecessarily!

I feel so strongly about the following subject that I need to break it down into 3 different posts to really convey how bad this problem is.

I am going to start at the local indoor sports centre.

I take my 2 year old daughter to Kinder Gym once a week. It is held at the the local indoor sports centre. They have a gym, personal training, gymnastics, boxing classes, indoor basketball, soccer, table tennis and the list goes on.

I have been going for about 6 weeks now and I normally don’t look at the counter as I walk in but last week Hannah came with me and her first observation was what was on the counter.

There was nothing for sale other than junk food. They had a pretty extensive range too, from dozens of different ice creams, to any chocolate bar you can think of down to lollies like red skins and milkos. Now if you would like something hot, they have a great selection including hot chips, chiko rolls, chicken nuggets etc. Do I need to go on?

This is just crazy. This is meant to be a sports centre! I am not stupid, I know it is up to the individual person to make the decision as to what goes in their mouth, but surely we can help out a bit by providing more nutritious snacks for after exercise other than 100% junk food.

There is no secret as to how tempting junk food is, especially for kids and especially when it is right in their faces all the time!

I don’t know what the answer to this problem is, I just know it is a problem!

What do you think?

What an awesome way to start the week guys! Thanks for making this morning a great class!

Last Saturday saw the final event on the Aroc adventure racing calendar and what a race it was!

We had every type of terrain you could ask for and we had 4 awesome teams participating.

Fitta Bodies 1 – Myself, Matt, Jack

Fitta Bodies 1.555^ – Darrin, Adam, Nelius

Fitta Bodies – Scott, Pat, Sprat

Last Minute Fitta Bodies – Rachel, Jason, Danielle

We started off in the sand dunes at Stockton Beach finding checkpoints attached to flags waving in the distance before heading into the biking sections where we found ourselves riding along the sand at One Mile Beach. Such an awesome thing to do and I can’t think of another opportunity I will have to do it either. Part way along the beach we had to pick up our bikes for some coasteering along the rocks. The rest of the mountain biking trails were pretty sandy, so we found ourselves pushing the bikes almost as much as pedaling them!

We then did some more coasteering and even had a quick swim out to a check point in a rock pool just off shore before heading back to the bikes and making our way to the kayaks at Fingal Bay. We battled the huge swells to cross the bay, dragged the kayaks on shore and did a massive coasteering section. Pretty gnarly too if you ask me, right on the edge all the way.

When we got back to the kayaks, the tide was so low that everybody was carrying their kayaks to the next checkpoint rather than paddling them, so we took a handle each and jogged it the 500m or so. Those babies aren’t light either!

It was onto our final beach run of about 1.5km’s and then we pedaled our bikes to the finish line.

Woo Hoo, we came in 3 hours and 28 mins in 29th place out of 178 teams. Not bad, but we were on track to make it much better than that before our silly mistakes…I’ll explain below.

So where did we go wrong?

We rode straight past CP16, when we got to CP17, we realised and had to ride back. There’s 5 mins atleast.

On the way to CP20, Jack got a massive calf cramp. I have never seen a man scream like this before, his calf pulled up into a ball. So Matt was holding his leg up, I was trying to massage it when a guy came along and quote unquote said “stand back, I’m a massage therapist” As funny as the quote is, he did an awesome job and it was so nice of him to stop and help out. Let’s say another 10 mins lost there.

We completely missed CP25, so we had to go back for that one as well. There’s another 5 mins.

So we know that at CP16 we were in about 12th place and guess what, if we took 20 mins off our time, we would have come in at 12th place…

But, we had a ball!

Well done to team 2 for coming in 3 hours and 33 mins in 38th place! Awesome, must have been that 3 hour, 35km training session we did last weekend!

Awesome result for Team 1.555^ coming in  4 hours and 6 mins in 89th place. They had a goal to come within 1 hour of my team and smashed that by coming in 38 mins after us, well done!

Last minute Fitta Bodies is so named because they only entered 2 days before the event, after entries had closed, but thankfully Alina allowed us 1 more entry into the race. They had a some navigational problems around CP’s 24 and 25 which set them right back and they ended up coming in 4 hours 48 mins in 145th place. They were tracking really well prior to that CP stuff up too!

Other memorable moments of the race…

Matt copping his bike in the jaw whilst carrying it over the rocks

Jack’s turet type outburst when he was cramping up

Of course the quote of the day “Stand back I’m a massage therapist”

Adam, Darrin and Nelius capsizing their kayak in the huge swells

The heavy downpour of rain soon after we all finished the race which saw about 50 people huddle under the Red Bull tent and then the flooded ground to get back to the car

And after it is all said and done, there is always enough energy to overhead squat something at a random location…

So who’s joining us for the next adventure race? It’s time to do something with your new fitness levels!