After all was said and done, I failed the pushup challenge.
I was doing ok. I surpassed the 85,000 mark with about 3 weeks to go. I was knocking out between 600-800 pushups most days and was facing a tough challenge, but was on track to complete my 100,000-pushup challenge.
Then, Covid Round 2 struck. It was Monday night and I went to storage to grab some of my tools to make sure I had what I needed in the final weeks before the Florida move. When I picked up one of the totes, something felt just a little bit off in my arms. I was a bit weaker than I expected. I wrote it off as just being tired from doing so many pushups and preparing to move.
Tuesday morning, I woke up and did 650 pushups for my workout, but I knew right away something wasn’t right. My arms were exceptionally weak and my muscles ached. Throughout the day I was ok, but by Tuesday night I was really struggling. I was tired. In general, I just felt pretty terrible. I took a Covid test and it was negative. Wednesday, I felt even worse. Thursday morning, I took another Covid test and there was no need to question, “Is that a line?” It was so very clearly positive. Then everyone else in the house got it.
The way it presented for me this time around was quite a bit of head congestion, a bit of a cough, and body aches – the kind where I was aware of every joint and muscle in my body for about 3 straight days. I was miserable. I did not have the mental fortitude to power through and do pushups in that condition. Since Abbie was a bit sick as well, we basically laid in bed and watched about 2 seasons of Modern Family in as many days.
While I was cleared and ok to rejoin society that weekend, we had to get the trailer loaded with all of our stuff from storage – thankfully we had hired a crew to do that and they were great. Even helping them a little and moving around to direct which things needed to stay or were particularly important was absolutely exhausting.
It might sound like I am insinuating that I failed my challenge due to Covid, particularly the second bout. But that’s not the case. I failed because I didn’t do enough pushups, plain and simple. I came up short by a little under 15,000. That’s only 100 more pushups on half of the days. If I had done more earlier I would have succeeded. I had too many 0 or light days and did not protect myself from potentially getting sick or injured.
So that’s it – I failed because I didn’t do enough pushups throughout the year. And that is how I look at it. I have had some people say, “Well, 85k is still a lot.” And yeah, it was a lot. But I failed my challenge.
In his book, The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter writes about how we need to get more comfortable with discomfort. He describes the process of misogi from Dr. Marcus Elliott. The misogi is a very difficult physical and/or mental challenge. There are only two rules:
1. It has to be “really fucking hard”
2. You can’t die
By “really fucking hard,” Elliott means that there must be a real chance of failure at the challenge. These challenges should push us to our limits and beyond – allowing us to see where our limits truly are. It should be something with a 50% chance of failure.
This notion is also popular with Cameron Hanes in his book Endure and David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me (with the 40% rule).
Your 50% and mine might be very different. “Really fucking hard” is scalable.
I don’t want to make this seem like I am saying, “Good! It’s ok to fail your challenges!” Instead, I look at it and think that 100,000 pushups were a great challenge for me last year. It was hard. I was close, but not quite close enough. I didn’t get completely blown away, and I could have succeeded with different tactics.
I learned a lot about myself in the past year. One of the things that I learned is that I really enjoy having a long-term challenge like that. 85,000 pushups were a lot, but I still failed the challenge. I feel the need to point that out again and again. I didn’t go out to do as many pushups as I could this year. I aimed for 100,000 and fell short of that mark. I’m not upset with myself. I am critical of my early-year performance. But I could have also pushed myself harder.
The challenge, my own personal misogi before I had even heard the term, was great. I hated doing pushups at the end. My overall fitness was suffering because all I did was pushups. I didn’t allow myself time to work on cardio, core, legs. The most I would do was burpees to get an overall workout, but still made pushups my priority. At the end it was a mental game. I could do 20 pushups EMOM for 40 minutes and knock out a quick 800 before work. But doing that is boring as hell. That’s where the mental game comes in.
I am coming up on my 37th birthday later this week. I have spent a lot of time thinking through what my next challenge will be. What could I do with a 50/50 shot of success? I have some ideas brewing. Things that will push me mentally and physically. Bringing me back to the hard work I did last summer – the hard work that I have essentially undone over the past 6 months.
What will you do to challenge yourself this year? Join me on a challenge. What is the first thing that pops into your head? Don’t try to rationalize it away. I think we all know deep down where we set our own limits, so my guess is that your first thought is something that goes a bit beyond where you are comfortable, but where you think you might actually be able to go.
So, join me. Pick something hard. You will be better for having accepted the challenge.
Understand failure without excusing it. If you have no chance of failing, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.
But follow the rules:
1. Make it “really fucking hard”
2. Don’t die
In this arena, a challenge is only good if you are able to accept another after. So do take care of yourself. But open your mind and see that the limits you put on yourself are far away from your true potential.
I may have just written that last part for myself…