cross training & conditioning.

Back earlier in the year I made a lot of plans and set a lot of goals.

One of those goals was to log three and a half million steps in 2023.

I have been meeting (and by all accounts regularly exceeding) that goal and the milestones needed to reach it.

So I thought it worth noting, simply, that today on my St. Patrick's Day lunch walk with the dog (a) knowing what my total steps-to-date was as of yesterday and (b) knowing what number of steps I needed today to hit the one million mark, that about five minutes from home the dog and I took step number 1,000,000 for 2023.

Not bad for a quiet Friday afternoon in March, huh?

Anything that isn't running, is cross-training... right?

Choosing to go for a walk on my lunch break rather than sitting and playing on my phone in the break room. Cross-training.

Choosing to ride the exercise bike while I watch an episode of television instead of slouching on the couch. Cross-training.

Parking at the far end of the lot when I go for groceries and strolling that extra distance to the door. Cross-training.

It might seem like I'm stretching (also cross-training?) to index some of these things to my training account bottom line, but on the other hand it's the thousands of little choices that one makes between now and the goal date that can make a lot of difference.

As I write this I have about 250 days until the start line of the Chicago Marathon, 2023.

Let's do a little math.

Adding, say, 1000 extra steps into my day (each and every day) is not a tough request.

Over two hundred and fifty days, that's 250,000 steps.

Conservatively, it takes about 1500 steps to walk a kilometer.

So, adding just 1000 steps into my daily routine means I add an additional 166 km of walking distance into my training routine, or nearly four extra marathons of training distance.

Sure, walking isn't running, but google "is walking important for marathon training" and you'll see a lot of reputable sources mention words like foot and leg strength, stress reduction, muscle stretching, and general lung capacity as benefits of walking.

All that benefit for a few extra steps.

My personal goal is to average ten thousand steps per day, that arbitrary goal that so many people strive for. It's an average though. Some days I'll walk twice that. Other days I'll do much less.

But of course it's the little choices that get me from a sad five thousand steps each day to a happy ten. Walking the long way to the office bathroom. Parking a bit further from the door at the mall. Going for a walk while I'm waiting for someone or something. Little things add up.

Among other frustrations, the inevitable finally happened. It slipped my mind to do my daily pushups

For the last 40ish days, I've been incrementally adding to my daily push-up tally, working up from a modest 20 reps in early August to missing the mark of hitting 60 (which I would have done yesterday... had I not forgotten!) In all, I accumulated a respectable one thousand, five hundred and eighty push-ups. And combined with all my swimming, I'm feeling quite a bit of strength improvement in my arms and chest.

So today, I'm restarting and kicking off a slightly different challenge, not resetting but instead leveling out and trying to do a maintenance push in my fall 50s pushup challenge.

For each day over the next, um, let's say until at least Halloween, I'm going to do fifty push-ups per day. No increments. Just trying to get to a grand total of two thousand push-ups before the end of October.

(To cut myself a bit of slack, I'm going to implement a single day catchup rule. As in... if I fall asleep at the wheel again, I can do double the next day to get catch up.)

In the meantime, my second challenge officially begins today: fifty push ups per day. Go.

Somehow it became September and the summer is basically over. The Kid is back in classes. The weather is still hot, but we’re starting to talk about snow in a couple months. And I still haven’t really run much more than a few trials of my knee sturdiness for a good two months. Ah. Summer. Uh.

I have been swimming and doing pushups tho.

And speaking of pushups, I’m really just dropping a post here so that I can post the next month of tracking on my daily increments of daily pushups. I’m starting the month into the 40s per day. Yikes. That means if keep this up I’ll be up in the 70s by the end of September. Double yikes.

So here goes. Let’s just keep pushing it.

The full accounting of this challenge is also available.