I did the hundred!

I didn't really want to post about this because I don't want to sound like I'm bragging or anything, but I've noticed tons of traffic on my sitemeter from the 100 Pushups Challenge website, so I thought I'd better acknowledge it.

Like just about everyone else in Blogland, I jumped on the 100 pushups bandwagon. I've always been pretty good with pushups, and I have a pretty small frame, so I knew I'd be able to get it eventually. When I signed up, I noticed a group of Arizonans doing the challenge, so I joined with them in a sort of virtual support group. I managed 44 on my initial test, and started from there. Weeks 1 and 2 were a challenge, but I made it through pretty easily getting up to 60 by the end of the week. Strangely, I was only able to do 62 on the week 2 exhaustion test. Week 3 was a big jump up, but it wasn't a huge struggle to get the numbers. Then week 4 came along, and I saw huge gains. I ended each workout significantly higher than the previous day. I jumped from 57 to 73 to 87 on the final sets. And the gains I was seeing were not just in the number of pushups I was doing. I noticed that I was starting to get some meat up there in my pecs. That's pretty cool.

Another exhaustion test was scheduled at the end of week 4. I knew I'd was getting close, but I wasn't expecting to be able to do much more than 90. Remember the week 2 exhaustion test? I was only able to do 2 more than my previous max. I was able to make it past 40 without pausing. Then, I started doing 10 at a time. Then 5, then 2. By the time I got to about 70, I could only do one at a time with a short pause and a deep breath between each. I slowly climbed up closer to the magic number. Then past it, all the way to 104 (and about 3/4 of the way to 105). Then I crashed to the floor, and my dog ran over to lick my sweat (he loves it when I get home from a run, too). Once I was able to get myself up off the floor, I went upstairs with a big smile on my face and told my wife.

So now I can proudly display my "I did the hundred" badge. Good luck to the rest of you taking the challenge. You can do it!