Today, I’m back to writing about challenging myself. It’s a recurrent topic for me, but one that I enjoy greatly.

I am not going to talk about past challenges I’ve done, if you’ve read the blog for a while, you’ll be already bored with them! If you haven’t, have a look around and explore (I’ve been tagging them as challenge, so they shouldn’t be too difficult to find, hopefully!)

So, what’s on the horizon for me?

I like challenging myself both physically and psychologically, because, well, I guess that’s what gives me the kick to go on. I’m not crazy about challenges, or one of those daredevils that would do anything without thinking… No, I like to keep everything a bit more manageable. Hey, not having soft drinks for a week can also be a challenge!

I have a few going on at the moment, so here they are, as well as why I’m doing them:

• Stop biting my cuticles. I’ve been sort of trying this for years. Truth is, it’s a bad habit that I hate. OK, it’s not killing me (at least not like when I used to smoke) but it doesn’t do much for my health either. The skin around my nails is not pretty, even if not horrible; and I always destroy any pair of tights I am about to wear. Also, biting your nails or skin is a sure way to get germs in your mouth, it changes the alignment of your teeth and also hurts with your finger posture. So, I’m now 32 years old, and I’ve been biting for as long as I can remember… But I’m kicking the habit. I’ve already been clean for about two weeks. It’s hard as hell, but I’ll get there.

• The 30 Day Sweater Challenge. I’ve never knitted a sweater/jumper before. I’ve pretty much kept to knitting rectangular stuff: scarves, hot water bottle cozies, and similar. I’ve tried to knit in the round before, but so far I’ve found it too confusing, so I’m not doing it for a while. After liking one of my posts, I went over to For The Knit Of It and had a look around her posts. I loved her blog, and decided to follow. She is also doing this challenge, so when I read about it, it piqued my curiosity. Half an hour later, I was already looking for patterns.I bought this pattern from Vogue Knitting and I can’t wait to start. The challenge starts on Tuesday, so wish me good luck!

In the meantime, I’m parking my Doctor Who scarf, which I had already started looking into, but seeing the Whovian Monkey on For The Knit Of It made me go for it as well!

• National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). This will be my third year participating, and I’m as excited as the first time around. I still haven’t finished my novel, so I guess I’ll “reset” the word count to zero again and keep writing. 30 days, 50,000 words. It’s doable, but I’m going to suffer a lot… Again, wish me good luck.

The two monthly challenges above are likely to make me socially absent for a while, as they require a lot of time and effort if I want to achieve the goals. I’ll aim to keep writing and meeting with friends, but it’s likely that I’ll carry my knitting needles (in October) and my laptop (in November) around!

As if writing a novel wasn’t enough…

• MoRunning. As part of Movember, I am running 2 different runs with work. I am organising them, and so far we are about 29 people interested. The first one (5k) is on Sunday, 17th November, in Battersea Park; the second one (10k) is on Saturday, 20th November in Greenwich Park. There. Now you can come with banners and support our team! If you would like to donate money for the cause and help us fundraise to help Movember and raise awareness for prostate cancer, you can do so on our donation page!

• Half marathon in Madrid in April. OK, this one is a bit further ahead, but it’s a challenge nonetheless. I’m telling you about this one now because I need to train for it. I’ve never done a half marathon before, and the idea is a bit daunting… Normally, I try to run 5k, more or less successfully, and I’ve done only one 10k run in which I never stopped to walk. So 21.5 km sounds scary. I’m looking at training plans and I think it’s doable. I hope. I’m running the Rock’n’Roll Madrid (Half) Marathon on Sunday, 27th April. If you’re in the area then, again, banners will be welcome!

I think that’s all I have on the calendar for now. Hopefully, my body won’t chicken out and get all cranky and ill every time I start training. I need to follow a proper running training in order to be able to run for that long.

In terms of knitting and writing… I’ve been doing the scarf for the past days, and my fingers hurt a bit, so let’s see how a full month of knitting turns out. Maybe I won’t be able to type on the laptop the following month! Let’s hope that’s not the case.

So, for the next months, and leading up to Christmas, I will be pretty annoying with the topics above, giving you updates on how I’m doing. Now, the more stressed I get, the more I bite my cuticles.

I wonder how that is going to work out…