I take offense

So last Friday Cooper and I agreed to enter an on-line exercise competition (www.introPLAY.com) with some friends out of state. I'm really not sure why we agreed - we had no chance of winning, and I am rather unfond of losing. However, we hoped it would help get us more motivated to work out more regularly and all (which was our friends' purpose in starting it). It did quite the opposite. In fact, less than a week later, we quit. I had been going on walks and/or bike rides daily and was noticing that I am not a very serious worker-outer. And we were quite quickly falling behind. This was okay though, because I knew I had a soccer game on Tuesday that would earn us countless, much needed points. However, on Monday Cooper played an hour of basketball. This only earned him 8.0 points, compared to the 13.3 points you earn for an hour of vigorous walking. He was a little offended by what the dumb computer was suggesting about his work ethic on the basketball court. The next night I nearly died playing soccer. Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit, but I did work my butt off (and as a bonus, we played great! By all reasonable accounts we won 3-1, although the official score might have been 2-2 - but that's a different story). Anyway, I got home totally exhausted and entered my workout. I spent the rest of the evening mumbling Spanish obscenities and shooting murderous looks at the computer. It gave me a whopping 6.8 points for my workout! It only gave me two options for categorizing it - casual or competitive, and when I chose competitive, it told me I had completed a "moderate" workout. I take offense. My 40 minutes of vigorous walking (I categorized it as vigorous because I was walking quite fast, pushing a stroller with two kids, snagging precious fallen cargo such as binkies or bobos, leaning over to hear jell over the traffic, singing songs and playing versions of "I spy" to keep everyone satisfied while trying to breathe) counted as 8.9 points. And I got to tell you, I felt the soccer workout a million times more. In fact, I actually felt it in my sore, tired muscles. So, I apologize to our friends but we quit. All the competition was doing for us was making Cooper want to cheat and making me want to throw the computer out the window - which wouldn't be a good idea since we just bought it last week. Apparently we don't need an computer competition to get us motivated. And until we find what we do need, we remain as sincerely unmotivated as ever.