Looking at the RSS feed of recent workouts, I've noticed that one of our major road blocks . . . cough Dave cough . . . has been extremely active this week. This means one thing: everyone else better get their three days in because I think we can hit the first week of the frequency challenge!

More seriously though, I've heard rumors over the past week that there are quite a few people interested in joining in on the fun but haven't quite pulled the trigger yet. I wanted to do a quick post about why we do what we do here at 2FNs, and why today is just as good as any to get going.

Brian and I started 2FNs ten months ago to hold ourselves accountable and to push each other to lose weight. We thought that having a blog would be a great way to report to the world that we were staying on track and achieving what we wanted to achieve. The blog quickly gained speed and has morphed into an ever-growing community of old and new friends, family, and pretty much anyone else who wanted to say, "Hey, I can do it too."

I think over the past few months, as our infrastructure and population has grown, a slightly larger barrier to entry for new users has developed. Learning how to submit data, for instance, has gone from just a simple, one-page form to an entire login-based tracking system. While this improvement was done to make past workout data more accessible to the user, it was also done for my own sanity, as the time it takes to summarize data in an Excel sheet far exceeds the time it takes for me to run a mysql query. With that change though, more energy is required by everyone submitting data.

I wanted to take the time to encourage anyone who needs help with that tiny bit of extra energy to get the process rolling. I wanted to make it clear that you don't need to have your data reported publicly, and you don't even need to take part in any of the challenges; all you need to do is sign up and, when you happen to workout, submit it. Getting data into the system seems slow at first, but after a few weeks you can really start to see what you've been up to.

Looking back to ten months ago, I don't think I could have really anticipated where this blog was going to go. We sat around talking about Music Monday, Tech Tuesday, Weigh-In Wednesday, and Food Friday (. . . apparently we weren't clever enough to come up with anything for Thursday). I really didn't think I would be sitting here now with thirty registered users on an online workout-tracking system. As a group we've competed in four road races, plus quite a few more counting Mark and Amy. We've almost run across the continental United States, which I had originally thought would take us years.

I guess the point of all of this is that if this is something you've been wanting to try, you should sign up and dive right in. And who knows where you'll end up ten months from now. I'm willing to make a bet that if you get involved you'll be looking at a more in-shape, healthier, and happier you. And hey, it's free.

Oh, and if all of that isn't reason enough, read this recent publication.