100 Days of Pushups = Lifetime of Empowerment
We did it.
Of more significance to me: I did it.
In this life, there are times to be selfless, and times to be selfish. When it comes to improvements in your own health—both mental and physical—being selfish is ok. 10,000 pushups, from the start, was really a selfish endeavor for me.
Think about it. Nate was already basically in peak physical conditioning. There's no wonder that he started busting out 200 pushups a day, finishing his 10,000 with over a month to spare. Peter, regardless of how hard he said this was, is still a skinny little 145-pound Asian man-boy. His mom could bench press him. This was not a challenge for him. As a result, it became a chore for both of them.
For me, while the mental fatigue of having to do pushups everyday just to stay on pace might have been a chore, every pushup was always a physical challenge. Peter wrote about the failures of Phase 2—and they're all valid. The novelty was gone. As we got stronger, we became independent. We spread our wings from the support network of doing pushups with each other. Of doing pushups with this blog. This blog suffered as a result. Lost amidst the shuffle of senior theses (plural for me), graduation, and finality of the end of college was the blow-by-blow account of how we finished this mothersucker up.
It might have been easy for the others, but it was never easy for me.
When I first started doing this, 10 pushups were my absolute maximum. At 7, my arms quaked with the earth, my face red with effort. The first day of 10,000 pushups, I did a grand total of 38.
I can now do 38 in a row. Maybe more.
The reason why I was continually challenged was because I stopped doing pushups just often enough to completely erase my strength while my weight made it difficult to do more, despite any miniscule gains in strength. Over the last 50 days, I accumulated 10 days of complete pushuplesssness, 8 of them during my home stretch of senior essay writing. While I had increasingly found pushups to be easier by the day, those 8 days of no pushups completely wiped me out. Bad eating habits and lack of sleeping during that same period led to an overall gain in weight as well.
By the time that I reclaimed the pushup manifesto, doing 20 pushups became as difficult as it once was, over 3 months ago. I started at square one.
But I stuck with it.
I endeavored to continue doing 100, in sets of 20 and 10, for the rest of the days before graduation. While it totally sucked to see that my strength had reset to prehistorically low levels after a measly 8 days, I kept on keeping on. I'd done it once already—and I can do it again.
On the night before graduation, the 10 or so of us gathered in my room for one last hurrah. With a night of (drunken) revelry and pipe smashing planned, the four of us dropped to the floor to do our final 8 pushups together.
As I said, 10000 pushups was a selfish endeavor for me. That's reflected in the fact that Critchlow, Nate, and even Peter (the eternal goal-conqueror), grew tired of it. Although Critchlow and Nate had already finished, those last 8 pushups they did with Peter and I signified the camaraderie that we had built up over the course of the last 100 days. I could not have done it without those guys and it meant the world to me that we finished the pushups together, as we had began them over 3 months ago.
For me, 10000 pushups was a transformative experience. For the first time in my life, I stuck with a health-conscious goal for longer than Yu-gi-oh cards were in vogue. This change has permeated my life from the foods I eat (crap… this cheeseburger is really gonna make doing pushups harder tonight) to working out on a daily basis (my body isn’t sore yet today…wtf?).
Now that I’ve been home for a few weeks, I’ve taken the 10000 pushups mentality with me. A couple weeks ago, I started P90X. I’d seen Jeb and Conner John aka The Terminator sweat away hours in the BK gym and this summer was the perfect time for my to whip my ass into shape. I’ve stuck with the daily workouts and slightly calorie restricted diets for the past two weeks now and I feel great. Having 10000 confidence-boosting pushups in my rearview mirror has been the bedrock upon which my present workout is based.
Really, 10000 thousand pushups wasn’t—and has never been—about the pushups. It’s been about the empowerment. You can’t really get jacked from doing pushups everyday. You can’t even get noticeably more muscular. But you can get your mind right. My once doughy body now feels remarkably more solid, even if it’s all in my head.
Over the course of writing this blog, I know we dropped the ball a few times, but I’d like to also thank everybody who read this. We’ve had people from literally all over the world drop in on the blog and I can’t even describe how many times random people would stop me in the street to say “hey, aren’t you that guy from 10000 pushups? GOOD LUCK!!” Your support meant everything to me and I will forever remember those chance encounters in the street, the spontaneous “drop and gimme 20s” in the dining hall, and the John McCainian inability to raise my arms after a set of pushups.
10000 pushups later, I might more-or-less look like the same John Song. I’ll be damned if my heart lets me stay that way.
Love,
John
PS: Here's video of our final pushups (action starts around 2:48):
