Back at it

So after 2 1/2 days off, I'm jumping right back into it. I did 10 pushups on Tuesday and 10 on Wednesday, so I have a few extra pushups to do over the next couple days. I realized at 9:00 pm on Thursday that feeling better means hitting the deck, so I dropped and did a set of 40-- my record for most in a set yet. I guess breaks have their benefits. I'm going to get about 150 pushups done and call it a night. Tomorrow has to be a 500+ day. I better stop typing and get to work.

UPDATE:

One thing that will stop me from doing pushups is a 100.2 degree fever.

They Just Don't Understand

My body has gotten used to the hundreds of push-ups every day; however, I'm still quite uncomfortable with the looks people give me when I hit the deck in public. I guess they just think I'm trying to be a macho-man, especially when I have a date right next to me. Whatever. They don't know my reasoning for doing push-ups randomly, and being a macho-man isn't a BAD thing, is it?

Locals are going to have to get used to seeing me drop and do twenty or thirty at the most random times. Confused looks from people and whispered comments such as "show off" aren't going to stop me from reaching my goal.

A New Push-Upper Takes Over

And It's About Time.

Nearing the end of 2013 I toyed with the ultra-stupid idea of going for 1,000,000 push-ups by the time I turned 50. This, however, would have taken too much time away from other pursuits, like making enough money to feed my kids. Or paying for a series of cartilage replacement operations.

Enter The Nephew.

My sister's kid Brendan has declared me an inspiration and has committed to doing 75,000 pushups by the end of 2015. Lunacy all around, but it's nice to have some company.

Welcome Brendan. Best of luck.

Make sure your health insurance policy covers cartilage replacement procedures.

75,000 Pushups 2015

So my uncle's 100,000 pushup farce has inspired me to challenge myself and do 75,000 pushups by the end of 2015. Started a little late, but better late than never. I'll try to do posts day-by-day, if not that then week-by-week. -Brendan T.

Day-By-Day
April-
22- 80
23- 270
24- 210
25- 120
26- 80
27- 100
28- 200
29- 220
30- 330

Small numbers, but you have to start somewhere
April Count: 1,610

May-
1- 250
2- 540
3- 320
4- 350
5- 10 (sick)
6- 10 (sick, can't do 0 pushups, had to get in one set)
7- 180
8- 20 (world series of birding- 24 straight hours of birding)
9- 130 (world series of birding)
10- 80 (no excuse for this one)
11- 350
12- 200
13- 400

The Toughest Mile

In high school I ran cross-country, on a team coached by a guy who had no qualms about whipping us into what he deemed proper shape no matter how many of us puked in practice. Wednesdays were particularly tough – this was when we would run through the woods to a neighboring park and an elongated oval of a parking lot. We’d stretch and talk nervously before coach called us to the line, where he’d then explain what we were doing that day, none of it pleasant. Ever.

Sometimes we’d run – and I mean run – four one-mile intervals. Sometimes we did sixteen quarter mile sprints. Once in a while he’d yell GO! And then get in his car and drive a kilometer away, to a point up a long hill, and wait for us there with a stopwatch. While we were all still bent over and spitting up he’d get back in his car, tell us to get back to the line and drive away down the hill.

Coach was tough. And our team (with no significant help from me) kicked ass every year.

The easy lesson here is that hard work pays off. As does puking, in context. But what I remember most about all those Wednesdays of intervals (besides the pain and the puking) was the oft-spoken (oft-screamed might be more accurate) sentiment that the toughest mile, the hardest lap, the most excruciating, most leg-burningest hill climb is the second to last one. It’s not the last one because you know on the last one that this is it, I do this and it’s all over (except for the puking). For every other lap or mile or hill you know you have more to go – and the more you’ve done already the more your system is screaming bloody murder. No one ever verbally agreed with coach on the whole idea that the second to last is the worst, but from the looks on everyone’s faces I think the sentiment was positively unanimous.

The feeling resurfaced early in December.

I can’t draw any neat parallel between the second-to-last lap/mile/hill during cross-country practice and a point in the final month of 2013. I can only say that in early December my arms felt like spaghetti while my body felt like a slab of marble.

For the first several days ideas of quitting lay like a rock at the bottom of the murky ocean in my head. I searched for shortcuts, and prepared excuses. I’m already way past last year’s total... I can apply the extra push-ups from other months to December... Ah well, Christmas is coming, lots to do… Then suddenly, in the next week I felt like Rocky Balboa – more or less, though my knuckles remained on the floor – and by the 14^th I found myself just shy of 5,000 for the month. The following week I felt sluggish again, muddling through 1,800 over seven days and doing the math in my head again and again: How many left to do? How many does that mean for each day left in the month?

And then...it was with ten days left that I felt myself cruising down the homestretch. 350 per day would do it – which, for all intents and purposes, was my pace all year. One thousand every three days equals ten thousand over thirty days. Two days of five hundred each got me a day off if I wanted – and could trust myself to get right back on my horse in the morning. And after all this time, what was ten days of moderate push-upping? A walk in the park. A piece of cake. Yes, I had earned the right to say such things.

I didn’t do 350 a day those last ten days. On a few days I did an extra set or two; on a few other days I slacked off – and wittingly so. I was going to make it. On the 27^th, the Friday I had to pack up the wife and kids and make the drive over to New Jersey for the extended family Christmas gathering complete with several large pizzas, Yuengling Black & Tan and a bonus drive to the airport, I only got in one hundred. No problem. And on December 31^st, the last day of my drive to do ten thousand pushups every month for the year (coincidentally, December 31, 1946 was the official end of World War II) I breezed through three hundred pushups – fifty more than I needed, just because I felt like it.

Because that last mile, that last lap, that last hill or that last set of pushups – it’s really no big deal.

It’s everything before it that makes you puke.

Which, in context, is all right.

It’s 11:30 in the evening, January 1, 2014. I’ve done no pushups today. Because this year I think I will pursue other things. Things that involve other people.

Whatever your goals this year, may you make it through your toughest mile.

On Second Thought...

...Forget that last post.

I could do it. But there is so much more to life than set after set after set of pushups on your knuckles, no matter how many different things your three-year-old can think of to put on your back while you are in mid-struggle.

Plus my elbows hurt.

The real impetus behind this sudden change of heart, though, is the gym access that comes with volunteering at the local fire department. As an EMT-in-training I get this cool little gray thing that unlocks all the magnetically-sealed doors at the fire house as well as the substation where, downstairs, they have a decent little workout room. In addition I can, I understand, go over to Gold's Gym and look foolish for free.

I plan to finish out the year doing my planned 10,000-a-month. From there we'll see. Who knows? Maybe I'll find I'm not cut out for stethoscopes and middle-of-the-night rescue calls and I'll lose my Gold's access and my little gray thing. And then it's back on my knuckles.

And my giggling three-year-old.

10,040 for November.

Rounding Up

I don't know what sounds tougher, 120,000 pushups a year or 10,000 pushups a month. Doesn't much matter I suppose, it's the same ridiculous hobby however you slice it.

I haven't been thinking a whole lot about it lately though - because another goal has been creeping slowly, insidiously into my head.........

Since I hit the floor 20 months ago or so I've recorded 200,000 pushups. (I can't say exactly how many I've done because, as I've mentioned in previous posts, unless I've been particularly militant about scratching out another mark in the notebook after each and every set it's easy for me to forget how many sets I've done in the course of the day.) By the end of the year I plan to be at 220,000. 'So why not keep going to the nice round figure of 250,000?'

Because, odd as it may sound, that doesn't seem round enough.

If my math is correct (not a safe bet), if I do 11,000 or so a month I'll have recorded 1,000,000 pushups by my 50th birthday. Then maybe I can quit this idiotic hobby of mine.

We'll see.

Over 100,000 for the year now. The kids started ignoring me and my knuckled antics long ago.

A New You In Only 10 Minutes A Day!

Ten minutes a day. How hard is that?

Depends on what you're talking about. And if that ten minutes is a minimum (as in exercise) or a maximum (as in facebook).

All year I've been able to keep up my commitment to do 10,000 pushups a month. At the beginning of each month, usually the day after I've barely hit my goal for the previous month, another 10,000 begins. I'd take a day off if I thought I could afford it.

A set of fifty takes a minute, more or less. According to my math that means ten minutes a day gets me 500 pushups. Done every day that amounts to 15,000 a month. Take every third day off and I still hit my target.

Yet somehow, sometimes, it seems hard to do even this.

It's not the physical part. Fifty pushups at a time has become routine, and not a difficult one. (Not bragging, that's just how it is after 190,000 pushups over the last eighteen months.) The tough part then must be mental. And mental discipline, I find, is my personal holy grail.

Losing Count

I have found a new way to punish myself.

Counting to fifty should not be difficult. Not for a grown man. But on more than a few occasions recently I have been in the midst of a set of pushups and lost count of how many I’ve done. This happens mainly because I have this habit of not counting by ones.

Sometimes I’ll count to ten, then instead of eleven I’ll say ‘one’ and proceed to nine, followed by ‘twenty’. Then back to one, up to nine and then ‘thirty’ and so forth. And whether from a lack of blood reaching my brain due to the ongoing physical strain or a lack of brain cells from my ongoing brain-cell-challenged life, I will sometimes forget what should be coming after one of the nines.

On occasion I will count to twenty, then twenty again, then finish off the set by counting to ten. This should lend itself to fewer mistakes; how can one possibly forget whether this is the first ‘twenty’ or the second?

I don’t know. But it happens.

And when it does? I punish myself. I take the lower count and continue. If I don’t know if I should be saying thirty or forty, I say thirty and keep going. If I don’t know if I’ve done twenty or forty pushups I call it twenty and go from there. (Sometimes I have a real hard time pounding out fifty and have to suspect I’ve actually done seventy but into the books goes another set of fifty.

If I keep punishing myself this way maybe I’ll eventually start paying more attention.

Maybe I should just count by ones.

The Journey

A journey of 100,000 pushups begins with...one pushup.

But don't pat yourself on the back too hard just yet.

Starting is easy. Continuing is not. Not always.

The journey is full of highlights and pitfalls.

We enjoy the former and celebrate overcoming the latter.

Really, this has nothing to do with pushups.

It just seemed like a good venue for the thought.

Catching a Break

Okay so I haven't evolved; aside from pushups I get virtually no exercise unless you count when I have to run dragging my kid to his bus stop so he doesn't miss the bus again.

I have adjusted the schedule. This should count for something in the planning & management department.

After doing the math again it occurred to me that doing 1,000 pushups every three days gets me to 10,000 for the month, which is the ongoing goal. So do 350 a day and I'm covered right? Well yes, but I recently also realized how cool it is to be dragging my butt down the stairs to the kitchen to try to get my son fed and readied in time for the bus and suddenly think 'Hey, no pushups today!'

If you can't relate to this, substitute the word pushups with 'work' or 'wife'.

So now I make it a point to crank out 500 or more pushups two days in a row, then take a day off. The results have been unbelievable! With regular days of rest and recovery my pecs are now busting out of my shirt, and because of this people come up and give me free stuff on the street, chicks dig me (even more), book sales are up, I've got more friends and followers than ever and I just won Powerball.

Okay maybe not. But the days off are still nice.

Time to Evolve?

No this is not me. Yet.

While doing push-ups has become part of the routine, I still think every morning: 'Maybe not today...'

Soon enough I start feeling guilty and hit the floor.

But lately I've begun thinking: 'Maybe mix it up a bit...' This post might be a start.

Short month - didn't even have the extra day like last year - but cranked out enough in the last week to pass 10,000...almost comfortably.

Here we Go Again...

Maybe I missed it after doing next to nothing once I reached the 100,000 mark.

Maybe I needed a way to keep myself warm in my chilly house. (Why do people still heat with oil? Stuff's expensive.)

Maybe I'm bored. (Nope, not with a half dozen writing projects and three young kids to manage.)

Maybe I suddenly began feeling lazy. (Closer to the mark, methinks.)

Or maybe I have this deep-seated need to punish myself, to attempt to make up in some karmic way for certain things I've done.

Whatever the reason, on January 1st I started in with the pushups again. After a short two-week hiatus I could feel my strength had abated somewhat, instilling in me a mix of despondence and disconcertment.

After a month of few particularly high daily totals and even fewer days of doing nothing, I've hit 10,000. Who knows what the year will bring; maybe I need a bigger reason this time around than 'just to do it.'

Or maybe I should go see a shrink.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Well that's a wrap.

Totally slacked off once I reached my goal, and though I didn't miss it, something did seem to be missing.

I remember the day I committed to this. I remember that night even more clearly - because I could barely sleep. Part was excitement; I had just put myself out there and told the world (the tiny tiny portion that was listening) that I was going to do it. This was meant to motivate me to keep going, because I know more than a few people who would really let me have it if I gave up somewhere along the way. Part of it was also fear - stemming from the same source as my motivation. Honestly, I had no idea what I was in for.

For a while I went at it with a kind of purity. I'd do each pushup in good form; I'd do some with my feet elevated to make it a little tougher; every set would be a workout - no quick and easy sets of 20 just to get a few more out of the way. Time passed, as did that freak pain in my arm in March, and the adrenalin of excitement morphed into the mentality of duty. Further down the road the routine devolved into just that. It was just something I did in spare moments on most days.

I'd liken my pursuit of 100,000 pushups to many undertakings that extend over time. A job. A relationship. Writing a book. The excitement is there at the outset (well maybe not always with the job). After a while it gets comfortable; you know how to work it and what to expect. From there it becomes part of the daily routine, and this is where things get sketchy.

Breaking the Tape (without breaking my back).

An Inglorious Ending. But maybe not really the end.

Check out the unimpressive moment below.

Thank you to my kids for their wonderful assistance.

Coasting Toward The Finish Line...

By the beginning of October I was so used to hitting the floor – or the grass, or the dirt or the sand of the playground – that not only did five hundred pushups in a day seem little more than thoughtless routine, doing anything less sometimes seemed a vacation - though much more often by evening I felt the day, at least in one respect, had been an unproductive waste.

I wouldn’t have been able to conceive of such a mindset back in March. Six months later it had become just another way of looking back on my day. I guess this is the sort of paradigm shift that comes with going for a goal that seems, at the outset, barely possible.

Good thing I was able to reach that point, because in mid-October my pace came to a screeching slow-down. The new job had me up at six and out the door thirty minutes later – enough time, barely, to squeeze two sets of fifty in between hyperactive mouthfuls of granola. I’d get home around seven-thirty or so, just in time to help the wife get the kids bathed and into their pajamas, and after a couple stories and some stern pleading to go to bed already I’d have another hundred pushups in me. Maybe.

In November I managed a third of what I’d done in previous months. Still, that left me with having to do all of two thousand more to make it to the finish line.

We are now into December. I’ll get there in the next couple of days. Then maybe I’ll figure out what it all means.

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.