Hi everyone. This is the last one before we start.
Ingrid and I are in Cape Town, sorting gear and waiting on the flight south, and we begin in Antarctica on Sunday.
What I want from you this week isn’t to watch. It’s to join in!
Here’s the 777 Challenge: seven healthy habits, about seven minutes each, seven days running, alongside us while we’re out there. Anything counts. Pick yours this weekend and tell us what you chose.
Watch time = 4 minutes. The challenge starts Sunday November 15.
Your Own 777
I’m writing this from Cape Town. Ingrid and I got in a couple of days ago and we’re laying out gear, checking layers, repacking, and waiting on the flight south. Antarctica on Sunday, then back here to Cape Town, then Perth, Singapore, the Algarve, Cartagena and Miami. Seven marathons, seven continents, seven days, all of them walked.
For ten weeks you’ve been following along while we got ready. This week I’d like you to do it with us.
Here’s the challenge. Seven healthy habits. About seven minutes each. Seven days in a row, Sunday the 15th through Saturday the 21st, the same week we’re out there.
That’s the whole thing. No app, no sign-up, no measurement.
Anything counts, and I mean that literally. Drink a glass of water. Walk around the block. Seven minutes of yoga on the bedroom floor. Call a friend you’ve been meaning to call. Cook something properly instead of eating standing up. Sit outside. Stretch. Put your phone in another room and read.
If you want to do more, do more. If seven minutes is what you can manage on a given day, that is the challenge, not a reduced version of it.
Seven minutes is a real dose, which is worth saying because it sounds too small to matter. Short bouts of light movement through the day measurably improve how your body handles glucose and insulin. The current physical activity guidelines dropped the old ten-minute minimum precisely because the evidence stopped supporting it. All activity counts, and accumulated small efforts behave very much like continuous ones.
One thing I’d add, and it’s the part I’d keep if you ignored everything else here.
Do it with someone.
Back in week two I asked a question we never came back to properly: who’s with you? This is where it matters. The strength of your social connections is one of the best-evidenced predictors of how long you live, with a meta-analysis of 148 studies finding roughly a 50% greater likelihood of survival among people with stronger relationships. That effect sits alongside the established risk factors rather than below them.
So pick a partner. Your kid, your spouse, someone at work, a friend in another city doing it over text. Ingrid and I wouldn’t be sitting in a hotel room in Cape Town with seven marathons in front of us if we hadn’t decided to do this together, and I don’t think either of us would have made it through the last year of rehab alone.
Your 1% this weekend: write down your seven. One line each, in if-then form so they survive a busy Tuesday. When I finish lunch, I walk for seven minutes. Then send them to one person and ask them to do it with you.
We’ll be posting from each continent as we go. Tell us what you chose. I want to know.
Thank you for being here for these prep weeks. This has been the best part of getting ready.
See you from Antarctica!
