Colby Shawver Completes 75 Hard Challenge!
Colby Shawver is a nice guy. Always ready to help you put up a birdhouse or two, smoke 20 turkeys, or just offer a smile, he works and lives with a quiet humility and an easy-going manner. If you’ve ever had the great luck to work with him, you know exactly what I mean. Smart, capable, and caring, Colby puts everyone at ease.
He’s also incredibly motivated. In fact, so motivated, he recently completed the 75 Hard Challenge. If you’re on social media at all, you might have heard of the 75 Hard Challenge. It’s a program that combines fitness, nutrition, discipline, and overall self-improvement.
What is the 75 Hard Challenge?
Created by Andy Frisella, the CEO of 1st Phorm International, the challenge can improve your, “confidence, self-esteem, self-worth, self-belief, fortitude, grittiness, and discipline.” Sounds pretty good, huh!
We could all use a little improvement in those areas. So how does it work?
There are five rules you have to follow on the 75 Hard Challenge:
- Follow a diet of your choice with zero alcohol, zero junk foods, and zero cheat meals.
- Complete two 45 minute workouts a day. One of these workouts must be outside, and the workouts must be at least three hours apart.
- Drink a gallon of water a day.
- Read ten pages of nonfiction every day.
- Take a progress picture every day.
Here’s the kicker. If you miss even one of these tasks, you have to begin the program over from scratch.
Think about it–75 days is a long time to be on such a strict schedule. So how did Colby do it?
How Colby completed the challenge!
I wanted to find out, so I sat down with Colby the other day and he told me about his journey with the program.
“I wasn’t happy with where I was,” he explained. “I’d tried other challenges before, and I always fell off the wagon. And I wasn’t in great shape. Weighing 248.8 lbs, I was at my heaviest ever. I didn’t feel good. I have young kids, and I didn’t want to be out of breath, huffing and puffing, when we play wiffle ball in the backyard. I had to do something and this seemed like a good one to try.”
So the week before the Super Bowl, Colby started. He thought about holding off until after the Super Bowl, but decided he didn’t want to put it off any longer.
As for the diet–Colby counted macros. That means he kept track of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and calories. He logged every single morsel he ate for 75 days. He didn’t cheat one time. The program is about eating as clean as possible, and Colby was determined to really do it. “If I cheated, I would only be cheating myself,” he explained.
The eating was hard enough because Colby’s family loves desserts and they were off the menu, but the workout was even more difficult to get situated. Colby and his wife, Alexis, have two active and busy children. And they both have full-time jobs, so finding time for two 45-minute workouts was definitely a challenge. After the first week, Colby began getting up around 3:30 or 4AM, so he could get that first workout in the books before his day began. That first workout usually consisted of lifting weights. He tried to get the second workout in over his lunch hour when he would go to the park and get a 45 minute walk in. As he progressed through the program, that walk turned into a run!
“It was harder to get my workouts in over the weekends,” Colby said. “There were times Alexis and I were walking after dark with flashlights, just so I could get my time in.”
The easiest aspect of the challenge was probably drinking all the water. Colby is a regular water drinker already, so that wasn’t too hard for him, and most days he had his gallon of water in by 4:00 in the afternoon.
He got his reading done during those early morning hours between his workout and heading out to work. He read 6 books in 75 days. “I’ve never read that many books in that amount of time in my entire life,” he admitted. But he plans to keep it up. Most days he got in 20 pages vs. the 10 pages required of the challenge.
So what about that progress picture?
If I had to pick one thing that would be the hardest for me, it would be that daily picture, so I was curious how Colby felt about it.
Colby reports that he got the picture in every day although there were times his wife, Alexis had to wake him up, asking “Did you get the picture?” and he’d have to jump out of bed to make sure he took it before midnight.
I asked him what the most difficult part of the challenge was for him, and he said it was creating a workable schedule. Traveling anywhere over the weekends made it much more difficult and having to space workouts out at least three hours was hard too. Having children and an active family life required him to plan around a lot of activities. It also required a lot of support from his wife Alexis who didn’t want him to have to start from scratch!
The program isn’t designed for weight loss in particular, but rather, a whole body/mind improvement. Even so, Colby lost a ton of weight. When the program ended, he’d gone from 248.8 to 215.5 lbs. And how does he feel now that it’s over? “I had heartburn all the time before doing the program,” he said. “I was drinking Mylanta and not getting a good sound sleep at night. I was winded running up the stairs,” he smiled, “and just last week, I ran a little over 4 miles, and I’ve never run that far before in my life.”
That sounds like a pretty good endorsement of the 75 Hard Challenge.