Limping Into 2021 On Fumes – The End Of The Pushup Challenge!

This year sucked.

I have been writing less, though things I want to write about are stacking up. Some were timely things that will seem disjointed when I finally get to them, but, that’s how this year has gone. I’m leaning into it.

Last year at this time we had had our Convalidation ceremony and hit the casino. That little jaunt to germville precipitated what seemed like a 5 week bout of horrible illness that we shared. For weeks we were coughing and drugged out and miserable. Of course, we considered ourselves lucky when Corona hit a few months later.

So things have been pretty blarg. I have bought a bunch of albums online (more on those later), but haven’t set foot in a record store for ages. No live music whatsoever.

The one constant this year has been… pushups.

I started a pushup challenge. One pushup on January 1st, then 2 on the second… and add one each day, for every day of the year. This was spurred by a post by James Stafford. Here is the post I wrote about it (with a link to James’s post included).

https://auralretentive.com/2020/04/09/1-pushup-2-pushups-3-pushups-more/

This has had its ups and downs. I didn’t think I was going to make it past 100, but made it. I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to do more than 25 at a time, but ended being able to do 50 in a set. Eventually I had to go from a simple set of checkboxes in Google Keep to a full blown chart. This is one of those notebooks you can wipe off the pages with water, or use the eraser on the pen. You can see that I have marked and erased over and over again within the squares so many times that you can still see the marks. I think I wore out the page. This shot is from day 364.

At about 275 I ran into a patch where I ended up leaving most for the evening, and then I was super sore in the morning. There have been stints of a sore back which didn’t help. I got through it though and then was knocking ’em all out in the morning and was super psyched.

However, sliding into the finish line these past 3 weeks has been rough. I’ll admit that my shoulders are aching and I am looking forward to being done! The mental part of this has been equally hard. Getting motivated to get started is hard some mornings, but when I realized I was in the last week I did get excited and finally calculated just how many pushups I would have done at the end.

I happened to start in a Leap Year, so I had an extra day. The total? 67,161 pushups.

The last day was today and with the fire of the last day under me I started about 5:30am anxious to be done and crushed them in about an hour and a half.

I played this song on my phone as I did the last set of 10. It seemed fitting.

I was proud of myself for finishing, and erasing the last mark on my chart was awesome. Maybe my technique suffered after day 300 or so, but I finished no matter how ugly.