Challenge Reflections From An Athlete's Perspective

Last year I compared my challenge experience to sex. (Why yes, actually, that was a popular post...one of the top ten here at Life is Good ;-). This year though, I'm going for a sports analogy. I tend to think in analogies, and sex and sports being two of my favorite pastimes, these analogies make sense. To this tired host at least.

When I was an athlete, I learned the benefit of not only discipline, dedication, but also teamwork. A team that works well together, supports each other, and each contributes in his or her area of expertise, can make the whole effort run like a well-oiled, smoothly running machine. I also learned that varying your work-outs leads to a better performance. All of these ideas translate easily to writing.

This year was my first time co-hosting, and boy was that fun. I felt honored to be asked, and we had a great time all getting to know each other as we worked together on this common goal. We discovered that our skill sets, though each different, really meshed in an amazing way. If we needed digital art? Jeremy. If we needed inspiration and encouragement, Jenny. Many of us aren't twitterers (not even sure that's the right term...) we had Konstanz and Damyanti. Lost your muse? Shannon. Of course with Lee being the buck-stops here guy, and Alex, Captain of the sign-in list, we sure needed our all-around awesome members who could do a bit of everything to fill in, and cheerfully. Thanks Matthew, DL, Elizabeth, Karen, and Stephen for sharing your many talents and contacts with us. (For the record, I was schedule manager and monitor of the info@ email.)

Dedication and discipline. These were obviously needed to complete this challenge. To me dedication means that since I've promised to do so something, I need to dedicate a part of the day for that task. Surprisingly, it turned out that late at night was my most productive time. The kids were all in bed, hubby occupied with one of his many engineering projects, so I could write in peace. Not to mention the fact that the deadline was staring me right in the face. At 1 am, posting at 5 am is a bit closer than comfortable for me, but it worked. I discovered the long since buried night owl in me. And consumed a LOT of popsicles.

Discipline means that it's not something to skip. If I've dedicated the time, I'd better have the discipline to follow through with what I promised. There were some times when this was harder than others. I loved mentoring new bloggers, and those bloggers who were new to the challenge. I loved getting emails and helping them through whatever difficulty they were having. It was also great to be able to forward those thorny ones to other team members with more skill in that area, as alluded to previously. I did have to learn how to balance my mentoring time with my posting time, because I knew that no matter what, skipping a post wasn't an option. So managing my time became much more crucial than when I was “only” a participant.

As to the varied work-outs, that's my take-away from this year. I came off last year's challenge super excited and rejuvenated in my blogging, but that slowly died as I went back to random posting about random topics that interested me. No cohesiveness. No order. NO SCHEDULE.

For the rest of 2012, I'll be dedicating and committing and disciplining myself to a 3-4 times a week posting schedule. Each of the days will be different, but I hope that they will all interest you:

Mondays: I plan on continuing to teach Swedish. It will be on a by-request basis. Send me the words you'd like to know. I'll add them to the list, and get to them in order received. If I run out of requested words, I'll choose my own.

Wednesday:

Poetry. I love writing poems, and want to experiment with different forms of poetry. I mostly write free-form, but would love to get good at some of the structured styles. I'll be linking up with a group of poets at dVerse, an online poets' pub.

Friday: Fiction. Maybe a practice scene from something I'm working on, or maybe a short, short story. Brevity is something I continually am working on (and it improved immensely during April, a good friend assured me of that, which means a lot to me.)

Saturday: This will be my bonus day where I can do anything. This day will resemble the randomness of what Life is Good has been so far.

I've decided on these varied workouts because I've been more and more contemplating my own tag line:

wanna be writer seeks place to vent, practice, and share

I think I can still do all of that, but I need some days of sprints, some days of distance running, and some days in the weight room, just building muscle. It's my wish that you join me on all my training days.

How was the challenge for you? If you weren't a participant, but ran into some of the rest of us in your journeys, what were your impressions? I'm looking forward to reading all of your thoughts.

P.S Don't forget IKEA gift card drawing on 5/12 (go back a few posts to find the details, basically: comment on the Swedish lessons). Another not-to-be-missed date is 5/14 when we introduce the 2^nd Annual Post-Challenge Challenge. Stay tuned.


Here's the linky if you still need to link yours.  Enter THE exact URL for the reflections post, NOT the front page of your blog (so opposite of what we did during the challenge)