Christine inches slowly towards her 2026 movement goal. – FIT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE

By News on SantoshHub Jul 28, 2026 0

When I started The Conqueror 2026 challenge in January, I set myself a goal of 730 kms of deliberate exercise* for the year.

For those of you playing along at home, that would be the equivalent of 2 km per day, every day.

Why ‘the equivalent’?

Because I don’t actually care all that much about walking that specific distance.

What I care about is increasing my daily exercise/activity levels and the Conqueror challenge lets me measure everything in terms of distance so all of my fitness activities are adding up to the same thing. *

If that sentence made you say, “Wait, what?”, please allow me to clarify.

The distance was pretty arbitrary in the first place – I picked it to represent the approximate amount of activity I figured I could do most days.
I don’t care specifically about walking that distance, I care about doing that much activity.
The app lets me input other activities – like calisthenics, yard work, or dancing – into the tracker and tells me the walking distance that is equivalent to that activity.
Since my ADHD self tends to struggle with tracking/measuring progress, especially if that tracking is overly detailed or fine-grained, having everything translated to distance is really helpful. AND having everything rolled into one metric reminds me that all of the different types of exercise I do are all part of the same goal – feeling better and moving more easily.

But even though the tracker is useful and has helped me to be way more consistent than I would otherwise be, I am currently behind on my challenge.

a screencap of a walking challenge tracker — a screen cap of my challenge homepage that shows two gray rectangles in the centre the top rectangle says ‘goal distance 730.0 km’ and the bottom rectangle says ‘Reason – to challenge myself to move a lot each day.’ behind the rectangles are two images that will be on the eventual medal I will receive. In the upper right corner is the long neck of a dragon outlines of clouds behind it. The dragon is gold and the cloud outlines summer gold, and some are bronze. In the bottom left corner is a grey silhouette of a howling wolf sitting on an outline of a rock and there are outlined clouds behind it. At the bottom of the image is a circular logo that says ‘Conquer 2026’. And shows two trackers. The top one in gray and black indicates that I have travelled 42% of the distance. I need to travel this year. The bottom one indicates that 57% of the year has passed. Underneath both of those is a sentence that reads 103.7 km behind your planned pace.

Luckily, I’m not fazed by this in the least.

There were definitely times in the past when I would have ditched the challenge by this point because of the focused effort it will take to close the gap between my current position and the ideal position for this point in the year.

But this current version of myself is looking at that gap and thinking. “I can totally close that!”

And guess what?

I’m right!

It may take me until the end of September but I am 100% confident that I will catch up, keep going, and earn a 2026 Conqueror challenge medal.

I’ll let you know how things are going at the end of August.

*And ‘deliberate exercise’ means additional movement that I have chosen to do – i.e. I am not measuring steps that are part of my daily activities.

**Besides fitness, of course, but the idea of being ‘fitter’ or having a good ‘fitness level’ is not even remotely tangible.

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Published by Christine Hennebury

I’m a writer/storyteller/director/creativity & lifestory coach with a black belt in ITF Taekwon-do. I read voraciously and I write like my fingers are on fire.

I’m the founder and Chair of the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl and I’m a former president of the St. John’s Storytelling Festival.

I bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.
View all posts by Christine Hennebury

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