Challenges - How's it Going?

This year I wanted to do more challenges as I had so much fun with them last year.  Because of last year I can rock a frickin jump rope like no one's business.  Or maybe that was this year.  Who knows, but it certainly has paid off when ropes come into our Crossfit WODs.   

So fun was one intention and the other intention was to find fun ways to get fit.  Or sometimes not fun, but to keep things interesting, lively, challenging.  You know what I mean.

Saturday was our Veteran's Remembrance Ruck.  10K run/walk with weighted backpack, first station was 22 push-ups and 22 squats with ruck on.  Second station was memorizing a quote and recital.  Third station was burpees thruster.  They called them man makers, but not the same thing as what I find online so let's just go with burpee thrusters, lol.  If you did the 5K you hit those stations once.  If you did the 10K you hit those stations twice.

Last year this was my favorite event we did and inspired me to get more involved in similar events.  This year, I am not sure what has been my favorite event so far.  I think it might be a tie between Tough Mudder and GoRuck Basic.  Each one has a reason for being up there in favorites.  But this year isn't over.  

Forgive me as I am going to brag a second.  I won first place for women's and 12th place overall.  Also to show some humility, I have a lot of room for improvement especially with the push ups.  That was a bit of a joke and huge time sink for me.  I took easily 3 times longer than anyone I was near doing those.  

I didn't choose to write this to be like oooh look at me.  Why I am writing this is to hopefully point out that the training, challenges, and different activities made this year's event significantly different than last year.  

When I finished last year's race I was done.  Like had spent all energy available doing it.  This year I could have kept going.  I can't wait till next year as I am hoping to really make an improvement on my push ups and cut my pace down as well (push up speed would definitely help with that).

So not a huge change in demonstrable ways, but huge change in how I felt in my body.  I would call my challenges so far a win!  

What are you doing to challenge yourself?