That's Right Just Play Around Me

When I embarked on this silly adventure back in February my kids thought it was absolutely hilarious. So of course they wanted in on the fun, jumping on my back or my legs as if daddy wanted nothing more than to play horsie a hundred thousand times. Get...OFF!... I admit I wasn't a good father about it.

Then they started imitating me, getting down on the floor - often so close we'd bump heads (Get...a-WAY!...) - so I'd begin doing these kind of diagonal pushups so I could continue on, determinedly-uninterrupted. It didn't occur to me to just move over a foot.

When we weren't cracking skulls they'd be just far enough away so I could see them out of the corner of my eye, and I'd collapse to the floor in grudging, unstifle-able laughter. Have you ever watched a two-year-old try to do pushups? I could close my eyes - actually I tried it - but the image was there in my head from the first time and my kid's own loopy laughter would set me off and my arms would give out under me. I wished they would cut it out.

Now it seems I got what I wished for.

The novelty of me doing pushups, and of them doing them next to me, has worn off. They still gravitate toward me when I hit the floor, but now they just want to play with their trucks and cars and trains around me. 'Tunnel!' my younger son shouts as he sends one toy vehicle or another flying across the floor under my stomach. Or into my ear. My older son has taken to stepping over me to continue with whatever he's into in the moment.

Even my wife has stopped breathing through her nose at me when I'm grunting through a set while our baby daughter is crying her head off somewhere.

For better or for worse, they all now know where daddy's priorities lie.

Cranking them out these days, what with the impending job about to cut into my schedule.

Time For More Pushups

In retrospect I figure I should have tried to get some pushups in on the flight from Tokyo to New York. These days that would likely count as suspicious activity and I might have been taken in for questioning, the perfect premise for the kind of story that in our society merits national attention (assuming I could somehow get the incident up on YouTube). Then I could parlay the whole thing into a blitzkrieg of traffic to my writing endeavors. What the heck, it's easier than figuring out SEO.

Instead I planned ahead and blitzkrieged my knuckles in the week leading up to my August 15th flight - 4,150 pushups in seven days already clogged with birthday stuff for my son, packing for the trip home, and taking care of the kids while my wife ran all over town trying to get done what would be borderline impossible once her wedded babysitter was gone. I'd also cranked out 2,600 pushups the first four days of August to make up for the zero I was planning to do on a three-day camping trip with the family starting the 5th, so overall I would have no quarrel with my conscience about planting myself in seat 43D and watching movies for 13 hours.

What I didn't plan for was how long my day off was going to last.

Progress, Regress, Progress

Outside in the grass on the morning of July 1st I cranked out 80 pushups without pausing. Progress! I thought, awash in adrenalin or some psychological imposter. I managed three more sets, of sixty each, before it was time to pack up and get in the car and make the long scenic drive back down through the finger lakes region and back to New Jersey. Unpacking, unwinding, domestic drudgery and frantic errands and we were packing up again, for a trip to Japan.

On July 5th, on a straw mat floor in my in-laws' house, I got back to it, laboring through a few sets of fifty. For a week I kept stopping there, or at sixty on occasion, shedding my jet lag and sweating through the pressing Fukushima humidity. I'd get used to the weather; I'd work around the weird sleep patterns until they subsided. But then on the 14th the biggest factor and the heaviest hindrance to my ongoing march toward my goal made itself brutally apparent.

I have my son to blame, and thank.

I thought they knew by now to not climb on top of me, but there was my second boy, throwing himself on my back in a fit of laughter and disrupted biorhythms. I've had a series of long talks with myself lately, about how to be a much better father than I have been, so instead of growling at him to go stick a rice ball in his ear I welcomed him aboard and gave him the best ride I could. 'All the way up!' I grunted - and felt my arms push the rest of me further from the floor than usual.

Since July 14th I've been struggling through sets of forty. My jet lag is gone. The meteorological gods have deemed fit to bless us with a cloudy, cool day here and there. Yet forty pushups has only become easier in very small increments. I'm not about to discount any of the effort of the last several months, but I'm stepping up the technique and the vigilance.

July 14th, incidentally, marked the passing of a milestone.

On July 14th, as I resolved to make things harder, and better, I passed 50,000 pushups for the year.

Defining Goals

It's interesting, this pushup thing. It has become just another part of the routine. Not routine like brushing my teeth, though. More like flossing. Which, incidentally, I always seem to forget to do.

 I began this pushup quest with equal parts excitement and fear: 'Yeah I'm gonna do this!' and 'Shit am I gonna do this?' I found places and moments to crank out sets of pushups that, slowly, increased in both length and frequency. I put as much variety into it as I could - feet on the steps, feet on the couch, switching the direction of my knuckles. My right shoulder ached, then my left shoulder ached, then nothing as I rested and resumed, rested and resumed. 500 pushups turned into 1,000, which turned into 2,000 which turned into 10,000. I checked my calendar and did the math. Yup, I was right on track. Every day was a challenge (how many can I get in before lunch?) or a justified break (I cranked it out this week, I'll start another big week tomorrow).

Now, at least on some days, it all seems just an afterthought. I'm only doing it because I have to. By the beginning of this month I was doing fifty pushups at a time. Here and there I'd feel particularly strong - or light, that's a cool feeling - and I'd crank out sixty at once. Given the steady improvement since mid-February it only made sense I'd be doing a lot more sets of sixty by now.

But I'm not.

'Let me see if I can do 250 or 300 by noon,' I tell myself. Sometimes I do this with the day's goal in mind - 750 or 800 or 1,000. But usually, these days, it's only a matter of trying to get them out of the way. And the endeavor is little more than a chore, something to be done because it has to be.

Yet it doesn't have to be. I can say forget it if I want. I doubt I'll be remembered as the guy who bailed out on his 100,000 pushup thing. If I am maybe I need better goals to aim for. And right there, for me, is the thing.

I've wanted to do a lot of things over the years. And some of them I've done. Yet I've never been one to set goals - concrete, defined objectives that tell me how hard, or how much harder, I need to push. Theoreticals like 'I'm gonna do as many pushups as I can this year' don't cut it. Neither does the subtly vague 'I'm gonna do pushups every day.' It's all about a defined goal in a stated time frame - why did it take me forty-two years to figure this out? Actually I knew; I've just been terrible at putting it into practice, till now.

So many opportunities to set goals in life.

I think starting now I'll make sure I floss three nights a week.

Note: Did my 30,000th pushup yesterday.

What's a Month Without Pain?

April came and went without two things I had gotten rather used to: pain in my shoulders and posting about my progress. The former is something I have been happy to do without. The latter is something that, I imagine, everyone else has been just fine without.

The month began with three days off due to the arrival of our baby girl. I spent those days trying to be helpful until I learned that my usefulness lie in getting the boys out of mom's hair; I bring them down to the basement or out to the yard and do pushups while they fight over things neither of them will give a crap about thirty seconds later.

The pain in my shoulders - perhaps more precisely, the pain in my right shoulder that seemed to migrate to my left - has gone. Only once in a while I get a minor tendon out of place early on in a set; I do something like what Mel Gibson did with his shoulder in Lethal Weapon and it's fine so I can continue.

Stamina is increasing. Since April 12th I've done nothing but sets of 40 and 50, except for a couple of 30s on the 19th. And then there was that set of 3 I cranked out on the 29th; my mental powers were not enough to overcome the blacktop of my driveway eating through the tendons in my knuckles, I barely made it through that third one without screaming like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. I don't plan on doing a set of seven (or seventeen, or forty-seven or whatever) to round out the running total; I will keep it like that as a sort of badge of courage..or is it more like a scarlet letter?

With a bunch of decent daily totals I managed 11,773 for the month.

I haven't been keeping track of how many diapers I've changed in that time but I'm pretty sure it's far less.

Keeping On Top Of Things

Started slow this month. Okay actually I started out by not starting at all. My wife had a baby girl on March 31st, see, and I felt a twinge of obligation to help take care of the boys until she was at least home from the hospital and more or less able to walk. But things are now back to normal - for me anyway.

Not keeping track of my running total should, I think, motivate me to keep cranking out as many as I can to make sure I am way ahead of the game when counting time comes. But then my obsessive compulsive side creeps in stage left and I have to do the math to make sure I'm not behind in the game. Sure enough, by April 9th I hadn't even hit 2,000 - far short of the 10,000 I need to average each month for the rest of the year. and who knows when I might fall into a job which would really screw things up.

Today I took the day off, and I just realized now that this is my third consecutive no-pushup Monday. Wonder what that might mean. In the previous six days I cranked out 3,420. And even managed to change a diaper somewhere in there, I think.

Pace

I've always been a runner. Not a good one, just a habitual one. And the habit wasn't particularly strong, it just lifted its head every once in a while, compelling me to go out and run five or six or ten miles, perhaps a sort of self-affirmation of my health - or a sprinting denial of my age.

There was a time the effects of these casual jaunts - heart pounding through my shirt, legs throbbing and wobbling, a kind of blurry double vision exhaustion - would wear off by the time I was out of the shower. Lately, however - and by that I mean since around 2004 - my legs have stopped appreciating such sporadic physical attention. Yet for all the lingering muscle aches and knee pains I've refused to acknowledge the solution: ease into it, quit these aggressive eight-milers until you can say you've done more than six minutes of stretching in the last month. Right now I am ignoring my patellar tendon, who hasn't quit whining since an overly-ambitious run around town on January 3rd.

When I started this pushup endeavor I took the same approach. I've done more dishes than pushups over the past year, but so what, I think I'll shoot for three hundred and fifty a day...on my knuckles...with my feet on the stairs or the couch to make it interesting. My right shoulder started hurting almost immediately and got worse from there.

After two and a half weeks of rest I resumed my pursuit of what seemed barely within reach when I began but now seems only a matter of easy, constant discipline. As long as I can control myself and take it easy out of the gate - a prospect that seems alternately wimpy and smart.

Since I resumed the pushups last Thursday I've kept them mostly to sets of twenty-five, with a few thirties thrown in to see how it feels. So far my right shoulder, the one that had been giving me grief, is okay.

Or maybe I don't notice because of the niggling pain in my left shoulder. Sheesh.

1200 in the last three days, including 500 yesterday - twenty-five at a time.