Our fitness story so far

I've never been one for team sports really and despite being thin, until recently I was definitely a couch potato. Sarah and I have both known for a long time that we were active enough however we never got around to making the necessary effort to improve that. In the back of our minds we knew that our journey to Oz could provide us the motivation we needed.

Except, we still weren't motivated enough. We were getting more 'general' activity than we had done in the UK, from being outside and walking the dog for example, but fitness? Not really. Until Sarah heard about Step Into Life through a colleague at work. SIL is a franchised company that does group personal training, outdoors. There are a variety of session types (cardio, toning, kickboxing, bootcamp, etc) and this type of outdoor, social training seemed like something we'd like. A free trial proved that we did. It's not cheap (in fact, you could say it's expensive), however we knew if we enjoyed it, we were going to make friends and get fit, it was totally worth it.

We've been going for nearly 4 months now. That's 2 cardio sessions and 1 toning session a week. David, our trainer, is excellent at his job and brings encouragement and fun to the training, rather than punishment and pain. There's a wide variety of people of all genders and ages that take part and you're encouraged to work to your own ability. This hard work has lead to us making huge fitness improvements. At our first session, I couldn't run 2km without stopping. It took me just under 11 minutes. I've now done it in 7:45. Toning and strength exercises have seen slower improvement, but we have both improved in that area too.

After being well and truly bitten by the fitness bug, we've also taken up running outside of our regular training. We've just done our first race event; a 10km run on a hilly course through the Hunter Valley Wineries. Our hard work paid off and we finished the course in 53:48 (Matt) and 1:11:51 (Sarah). 3 months ago that would have been impossible. And it doesn't stop there. On August 9th we're taking part in the City2Surf, a fun run in Sydney that goes from the CBD to Bondi Beach. That one is 14km. Then on my birthday (August 30th, don't forget!) we're doing the Lake Macquarie 10.5km. That's around the lake and is local to us, pretty much right on our door step.

We're fitter, healthier and next time you see us we'll be leaner, stronger and faster.