VA-VOOMing again

holy wow. june va-voom was BAAAAAH-NANAS!

we had 43 contestants, $430 in prize money, and thousands of calories burned.

i personally enjoyed being in the top spot for about 5 days (off and on) and then also really enjoyed getting my ass handed to me and getting smoked right off the spreadsheet by some seriously hard-core chicks.

as predicted, the motivation totally worked. if i saw (and i stalked that google doc like whoa) that i was 5 points behind the next highest position before i went to bed, i would seriously get up and lunge around my house until i hopped up the leaderboard.

at least 5 times i was ready to watch TV for the night or go to bed, and instead i looked at the spreadsheet and saw how much my competitors had done that day, and that inspired (shamed) me into getting my gear on and running 2 miles in the dark of the hot georgia summer nights.

i sucked it up after a mid-month road trip and just coasted the rest of the time to end with an 18th finish.

but big congrats to the beastly chicas of the top ten who took home prize money and rock-hard bods after a month of hard work:

and just to give you a clue of exactly HOW miss CE got her 604 points in 30 days, here's what that works out to:

-845 triceps dips

-1820 full sit ups

-57 minutes worth of planks

-659 boy pushups

-1200 lunges on each leg

-60.5 miles run

-27.6 hours of other cardio

so yeah. she earned it.

the good news is that you DONT need to be intimidated by this because as you can see, people did even half this amount and still landed in the top ten. (i ended up with 156 points and am perfectly pleased with that).

i took the month off of hosting this thing to regroup and figure out how to make it better (and easier for me! i was spending an hour a day managing the spreadsheet...which does not burn calories, FYI).

but i am all set to get back into it in august for anyone who wants in.

i have made some changes (after a great brainstorming session with my highschool valedictorian, 1600-scorer on her SAT's, harvard graduate, 4th place june va-voom finisher, and all around awesome chick, maryann) that i think will make august more fair (to all schedules and fitness levels), fun (more graphs!), and motivating.

one of the biggest changes is that there will be no late signups. this about killed me last time. i am an excel wizardess, but i HATE google doc's version of excel, and once that monster was shared, i didnt want to take it out and put it into my desktop version to edit for fear of getting un-clouded and messing up someones data.

so i need to have everyone in by NOON ON JULY 31.

to read more about the nitty gritty changes, suggest new ideas, and to sign up (it's open now!) just go here to my sparkly VA-VOOMS! page which can also be found underneath the header up top of the blog.

who's in?