cross training & conditioning.

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.

With my inability to run these days, yet with an abundance of pep and motivation, I feel like I need to challenge that into something physical and useful.

Bring on the push up challenge.

I've added a way to track daily push ups in this site, so starting August 11, 2022 I'm going to see how many days I can do daily push ups, adding one each day. No strict rules, other than getting it done.

Here goes.

If I had to miss a season of running I suppose it could be a worse season than summer.

Hear me out!

Living in a city on the Canadian prairies, my tolerance for hot summer temperatures is not what one might call ... um... great. I prefer the cold. I love spring runs in the rain. I adore the brisk aurum dashes through the fermenting wafts of fallen foliage. Trudging through the snow on a cold January day is often an experience of epic apricity and delight.

The summers are just hot, muggy, cluttered with biting and stinging insects, and better spent in the shade of a patio. Not to mention, I've had heat stroke more than once on a hot summer run.

I watched as my crew returned from their 10k Sunday run dripping with sweat and complaining of exhaustion even at 10am. I was feeling refreshed from a dip in the cool of the pool where I swam less than ten percent of their distance, but actually completed my workout. They spent half their run walking. No disrespect intended as I would have been walking right there with them.

If all goes well I should be back on the trails sometime in September (or at worst, October) just in time for those autumn breezes to remind me of the awesomeness of nature. For now, I'll rack up some more swimming distance in August and enjoy the outdoors with a cool drink this year instead.