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.

Baby Steps

Sets of 25 are a relative breeze. It only gets tough if I do a few sets without much rest in between. Which makes me think hey, if I spread out fifteen or so sets of twenty-five throughout the day - and do it most days for the rest of the year - I'll reach 100,000 without breaking a sweat, even in August.

And I'll be left, I think, with a feeling of empty accomplishment.

Need more time to ruminate on this.

Today marked the first time I did pushups in someone else's house. Also the first time I put my knuckles on a hardwood floor. One set of that was enough, and I pushed the coffee table out of the way to make room on the rug. 350 today, fourteen sets of twenty-five. And a touch of dissatisfaction.

Back on the Knuckles!

Almost three weeks since I put myself on medical leave. Like the variety of niggling physical maladies that I propagate through denial I suspect the shoulder thing will never completely disappear but forever ebb and flow, like nausea-inducing news of certain useless celebrities who refuse to go away because we just can't seem to ignore them.

Until I heard that mysterious snapping sound in my arm on the morning of March 4th I was pushing myself, slowly but surely, to increase the rep count and intensify the exertion. Now I am shifting gears, hoping shorter sets will allow my shoulder ('rotator cuff' says the majority) to heal even as I continue my pursuit of 100,000.

This is the deal I am striking with my body and my mind. I'd love to hear some similar stories from others.

Ten sets of 25 yesterday = 250 on the day.

Spring has sprung. Life moves on. It's beautiful today in New Jersey.

To Pushup Or Not To Pushup

The nagging pain in my right shoulder will not die, no matter what I try to drown him with.

Work through the pain! the gunnery sergeant in my head screams. And I have been, but only because - and this makes no sense to me - it doesn't hurt when I'm doing pushups. It hurts when I take my shirt off. And when I pick up my kid. And when I twist the bottle cap off whatever I'm drinking to try to drown the pain.

But out of 460 pushups yesterday, only like 3 of them hurt.

When I sat up in bed this morning I felt a piece of dry spaghetti snapping in two inside my arm. Putting on my shirt hurt. Pouring a bowl of cereal hurt. (Eating while checking the sports section was painless.) All day, doing stupid little domestic things, it hurt. Except when I went out to the backyard to work on cutting down a dead 40-foot tree. This little demon is not going away - unless I rest him into extinction. A week off might do the trick, and over the long haul I'll be able to make them up and reach the goal.

Or I can just keep doing pushups, cutting down dead trees, eating cereal and reading the sports section.