How to stay connected during a pandemic? 200 squats a day helps Olympic medalist Rosey Fletcher do it

Here’s the deal with Rosey Fletcher’s 200-squat challenge: You don’t really have to do 200 squats, and if you do, you don’t have to do them all at once. You certainly don’t need to power through them in five or six minutes like Fletcher often does.

Heck, it’s barely even a challenge, at least not in the conventional way. The Anchorage woman isn’t asking anyone to donate to a charity or perform feats of strength and speed like an Olympic athlete, even though she herself is a three-time Winter Olympian who claimed a bronze medal in snowboarding at the 2006 Turin Olympics in Italy.

She just noticed that during the pandemic, life seemed to slow down and “new normal” became the catchphrase of the year.

“Everybody is just having to do things a lot differently and I’m kind of exploring what that looks like now,” Fletcher said. “Gyms are open, then they aren’t.

“That’s kind of where the squat challenge came from. ... I thought, ‘How can we stay connected?’ Exercise for me has been for mental health as well as physical health, and I thought, ‘How can we do this and have it still be fun and positive and we can adapt it to where we are?’ “

Fletcher started doing squats outside on her deck, with the goal of 200 a day. She posted a photo on her Instagram account. As the weather got colder, she moved indoors, again striving for 200 a day. She posted a video on Instagram.

“I kinda put it out there,” Fletcher said. “I tagged two people and challenged them to do it. All of a sudden I started getting these tags on Instagram. A former teammate in California did hers on a beach. A girl in Homer did 200 on the beach dressed totally different. A friend did it in Texas.

“We’re a collective community, all working separately.”

Fletcher doesn’t share the photos or video that she’s tagged on, because she figures they’re private. But she shares a story about a woman from Haines who tagged her.

“She did her 200 squats in a yurt with no electricity and I believe she was six or seven months pregnant — I didn’t even ask her because that’s private, and I’m not going to repost her post,” Fletcher said. “But I felt compelled. There’s a woman in Haines living in a yurt with no electricity who’s pregnant — it’s beautiful. Your journey is always taking different turns and hills and valleys, but that doesn’t mean you don’t go ahead with your goal.”

Fletcher, who turns 45 at the end of the month, remains fit and active nearly 15 years after she retired from a long career as an alpine snowboarder that reaped an Olympic bronze medal and two World Championship silver medals.

She’s the mother of 10-year-old Oskar and 8-year-old Olga; Oskar is more into scooters than squats, but Olga sometimes joins in.

Fletcher runs two businesses, one as the baker of exquisitely decorated cakes and the other as the creator of botanicals made from products harvested in Alaska. She recently taught Scott Gomez about baking on an episode of Scotty’s House, the YouTube show starring the NHL great from Anchorage who played for Team USA at the same Olympics where Fletcher won her medal.

As for the squats, the simple but effective exercise has always been part of Fletcher’s routine. They work out a number of lower-body muscles, strengthen the core and tone the legs and butt.

Fletcher likes to do hers while listening to appropriately upbeat music. Her goal is to do 200 consecutively, and she mixes things up by following 40 or 50 regular squats with some cross-lunge squats or other variations of the exercise.

In October, she missed a couple of days with a sinus infection. And that was OK.

“I feel like especially in these COVID times you have to be gentle to yourself,” Fletcher said. “I’ve always been really hard on myself — it’s one of my downfalls — but I’ve really worked on some self-love and just being gentle. I’m teaching the kids at home and I’m not a teacher — I’m lucky if they do one math sheet — but I’m really practicing compassion.”

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Fletcher said her philosophy during the pandemic is to take advantage of a slowed-down life.

When she retired from snowboarding, she was a year away from an undergraduate degree, so she’s finishing it now. She’s taking a hip-hop dance class. She sometimes picks up Sunday dinner from an older Colombian woman who makes food native to Colombia. When she needed some garden boxes, she bought homemade ones from a man who had lost his job because of the pandemic and was making do the best he could.

“It’s connecting with people in the community on a micro scale,” she said.

The squat challenge is another way for her to connect, one that comes with the benefit of helping you look and feel better after a few weeks.

“We’re kind of in it together,” Fletcher said. “That’s why I didn’t say you have to do 200. Be wherever you are, and be gentle.

“... I don’t want anyone to feel guilty or bad — that’s their business. I wanted to plant the seed of doing the best at that moment, and that you can do it anywhere, you don’t need a gym, or a this or a that or even a mat. Just the desire.”