How to be healthy is something we will definitely need to know all our lives. That is why it is vital to learn it now. One big part of your health is your Physical fitness. Your ability for you to move around to burn calories is a main part of that. The way many people keep their physical fitness in check in by doing cardiovascular exercises, otherwise simply called cardio. Cardio is when you move quickly so your body burns many calories. Now I'll be the first to say I hate doing cardio for long periods of time. Being a dancer I enjoy high intensity short intervals of different cardio movements. The complete opposite of that is running the mile. It's long, hard, and the same thing the whole time; just running. One of the reasons I dislike it is that I can't go for very long. This means I have bad cardiovascular endurance. Though this year I did improve my cardiovascular endurance over the course of the 28-day challenge.

The 28-day challenge was an assignment given to us in Wellness and Fitness class. The goal was to improve on either your upper body strength, your abdominal strength, or your cardiovascular endurance. To decide which of these we needed to improve we did pre-tests. We recorded our scores on these pre-tests on a sheet of paper. This is where we kept both the pretest scores and the national average for our age. As you can see, the first column is where we recorded the pretest data. We did a push-up test, a sit-up test, and ran a timed mile. My mile time was 12:12. Then, we looked at averages for what we should be getting on these tests for our age and gender. I was average or above average in all tests but the mile run. My mile time was about two and a half minutes slower than the average for a girl my age. This left me unsatisfied but motivated to improve. So, I chose to improve my cardiovascular endurance during the 28-day challenge.

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To start the 28-day challenge, we had to make SMART goals that followed the FITT principles. SMART goal stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Reasonable, and Timeline and FITT principles stands for Frequency, Intensity, Type, and Time. We had to create a weekly schedule of workouts so we could meet our goals. My SMART goal was, by the end of the 28-day challenge, to get my mile run time down to at least 11 minutes. During the pre-test, I ran a 12:12 mile time. The average was 10:23. The reason my goal was only to get it down to 11:00 was that I wanted to make sure my goal was still achievable. We recorded all of this in our 28-day challenge booklet. This kept our goals, our workouts, our schedules, workout data, and thoughts before, during, and after.

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For my workout schedule I had to do jumping jacks on Monday, Thursday, and Sunday; run the mile on Tuesday and Saturday; and rest on Wednesday and Friday. On jumping jack days, I did 5 reps of 50. A rep is the amount of times you do a set number of an exercise usually resting in-between. I also had to get my heart rate to at least 150 beats per minute or bpm so by the end of the challenge I was going quicker. On my mile-run days, I had to run the mile and get my heart rate to at least 170 bpm. I also had to improve my mile time every week by at least 15 seconds. I did this schedule for 28 days, hence the name. At the end, we retook the test. Prior to the final test my fastest time was 10:48. That final day something lit a fire under me and I put all I had into that mile despite being both sick and injured that day. My final time 10:22. This shows I grew because my time was faster.

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I hope to keep improving my endurance over the years. While I do still hate running, it is a good way to stay in shape. I will always try to improve my health. I remember during the mile I told myself I was being chased so I needed to outrun whatever was chasing me. But unlike most things my health is something I will never be able to outrun. No matter what it will follow me through life so I just need to keep running with it.

This my 28 day challenge booklet

This is my mile time at the beginning of the  year.  ( My partner put the comment)