Challenge Two: 20! Valley of Death (revisited)

The human form allows for a push-up to be a primary function of working out. Nearly all upper body exercises trace their lineage to push-ups. Raw as physics, elegant as creation. Body weight and gravity -- push the body away from the Earth’s gravitational pull as many times as possible. The simplicity. The beauty. The agony.

Revisiting the fractional push-up challenge excited me. Focusing on push-up training taps into my love for exercises that take me on a walk down the lonely road. Work has to be done, and on my own. The work Jaron assigned was a basic high rep, long rest set of push-ups. Twice a week for six weeks I did five rounds of forty push-ups on five minute intervals. Warm up the shoulders with a few sets of ten, then get it on! Two hundred push-ups across twenty minutes is middle of the pain spectrum for workouts. But two days later the soreness grenade explodes. Overnight, the sternum’s anger draws in the pectoral muscles, causing the shoulders to roll and the back to hunch. The toes hurt too. After being a fulcrum for all the push-ups, a slight drag to the step can be seen by the villagers. Envy not Quasimodo, the bells of my cathedral will ring once I can raise the hands above my belt.

The challenge goes as follows: Start with 20 push-ups, rest :30 seconds. Then proceed to remove one rep every round on :30 seconds rest, down to 1 rep. The Valley of Death version calls for going back up to 20 after hitting 1. Adding one rep each round. When all is said and done, it is a 420 push-up workout. This go around I decided near the bottom to revise the rest from :30 seconds to :20. Twenty-five minutes later the sweat poured and life was still grand.

Next challenge: Spartan 300

Hula-hoop ain't no punk

A few years back my ole swim sister from another mister, Tracy began diversifying her fitness plan with a hula hoop. I snickered at her assertion hula hooping is a legitimate form of exercise -- in the same pantheon of running, crunching, pushing up, pulling up, and so on and so forth. Yeah right! The water buffalo colony bobbing in the pool’s shallow end, and grooving to Jazzercise hits of the 80’s have a better argument for calling their social hour a work out than does Tracy. Keeping a plastic tube spinning is bygone child’s play. Maybe if you were a ten year old in 1952 hula hooping could be considered exercise. Interestingly enough, that era’s logic pool promoted smoking as a vacation for one’s throat. Kids, do your patriotic duty for the country. Hula hooping and smoking Camels keeps you relaxed and physically fit to fight those Commies. For Pete’s sake, Tracy watches television, responds to text messages, and reads academic publications during her forty-five minute “work outs.” This propaganda is brought to you in part by the generous donation by The Foundation for A Sucker is Born Every Minute. Got any Nigerian Princes who need support? I refused to buy her crap for years. Until I gave it a go last week. SON OF A MOTHERLESS GOAT HERDER!!!

Karma has my number on speed dial. When I sarcastically informed Tracy of plans to give her hula hoop work out a try, I had no reference point to begin from. And who would have thought I needed one? It’s a freaking hula hoop. A plastic tub, spun around my hips, while squandering precious work out time. Things quickly turned ill once the realization set in that I had never successfully hula hooped before. With the help of my wife, being laughed at (not laughing with) by my kids, many YouTube videos, and three days of failed attempts to get the dang tube of torture to stay spinning around my hips, I finally got the hang of it. That is if the home audience considers getting the “hang of it,” as an all-out :30 second burst of frantic sweaty hip convulsions. If so, then I am hula hooping. Repeated for twenty minutes constituted a quasi work out. The ribs, gut, and hip bruising will fade with time. The pride… that could take a while to heal.