Headed into 2025 I was fat, out of shape, and lazy. My three young children were running circles around me, and I was increasingly concerned not only about my health in general but about the kind of example I was setting for them. My (very) sedentary job in front of a laptop wasn't helping, nor was the fact that my favorite hobby in the world outside of work is, well, sitting in front of the laptop.
Adding to the general anxiety was the fact I had spent the last two years watching my parents struggle with devastating health issues. My parents had me in their early 20's, so all said they really weren't that much older than I am. My thoughts regularly turned into worry that I'd eventually wind up with my own serious health problems if I didn't get my act together.
I wanted to do something about it, but what? Past attempts to go to a gym weren't successful, and I really did not want to drive any more than I already do serving alongside my wife as a kid taxi. Also, having made half-hearted attempts in the past to get into shape (Orange Theory, P90X, etc) and winding up spending less time exercising than researching the minutiae of max VO2, bicycle construction, and fasting benefits, I knew I had to keep things simple.
While on a post-Christmas family vacation down in Florida I concluded it made sense to set a goal that could help me get into better shape but which also could be completed in small chunks over a long period of time. It was also important that I could do the workout at any point in the day and even in my office if necessary. And thus began the quest to complete 10,000 pushups in one year. Almost 10 months later, this harebrained goal and the many positive effects that came from it changed my life in ways I never imagined.
January, 2025 - The Pushup Tracker
While still in Florida I fired up a Google Sheet and added two columns to it: Date and Pushups. And on January 1, 2025 I dropped down and knocked out 30. Well not 30 in a row, mind you. I never could have done that on day 1. It was more like 10, 10, 5, 5 or something like that. Then I wrote it down. On January 2 I upped my game a bit, doing 35 and again immediately logged into the sheet and wrote it down again.
In the days that followed, the reward very much became the opportunity to open that sheet. Can't write the pushup number down if I didn't do the pushups, right? I didn't want to break the chain (although you'll later see I did in fact break the chain plenty of times in the months ahead) and so in the first 31 days I did pushups on 24 of 31 days, logging 1,018 in total and averaging 32.84 per day.
I even worked up the motivation to run on a treadmill one day in January, logging 2.17 miles in 30 minutes on January 14, 2025. Other than that run and pushups, according to my spreadsheet I did no other notable exercise that month.
It was also in January that I stopped eating fast food of any type, and as of the day of this writing I've not reversed course on this decision. Long story short we were driving back from https://codemash.org/ and pulled through a McDonalds. I had at that point been eating McDonalds all of my life; nothing over the top mind you, but probably twice a month at least for as long as I can remember. Anyway, the food that day was rancid. Legitimately nauseating. I have no idea why it was that way but I was so turned off that right there and then I swore I'd never touch it again. Coincidentally, over this past weekend I was on a walk and reflecting on some of what I'd been writing in this blog post, and my thoughts turned towards diet. When was the last time you heard somebody (including yourself) say they feel better after eating fast food? We all know the answer to this question: never. This stuff is not food and I feel so much better staying away from this poison.
February, 2025 - Winter Blues Set In
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