As a child, I was a soft-bellied sloth.
In my young-adult prime, a mix of healthy outdoor physical activity, all-night dancing, and obsessive weight-training created a woman who could appear in public in a bathing suit without making people think of beluga caviar.
Over the past few years, however, the sloth has returned.
Not satisfactory.
Because you just know it’s the start of an irrevocable downhill slide into physical decrepitude and stretch polyester from a discount department store.
Sure, a walking program and healthier eating habits have started to turn around the waistline expansion, but there’s still good reason why I flee from certain fashions — and have no upper-body strength to speak of. (Jello arm flaps are looming in the near future, I tell you!)
And that’s why I’m cursing Kristen Healy.
Runner, knitter, spinner, geek, and otherwise quite a perfectly lovely person, KCH refused to let blissful ignorance lie on soft pillows.
Note the runner bit — that implies a modicum of fitness, and a good headstart on this 100 Pushups challenge she’s unaccountably sucked me into.
The only running I ever do, these days, is away from a camera…
But I digress.
Here’s the deal, for anyone else with a masochistic yen for self-improvement who might care to follow along (yes, misery does love company):
To improve your strength, fitness and general health all you need to do is commit about 30 minutes of your time per week, and follow the push ups training program as closely as you can.
It’s a 6-week program, beginning with an initial test –
Once you’ve collapsed in a sweaty heap on the floor and your arms have stopped trembling from the exertion, make a note (mental or otherwise) of how many, or how few, push ups you were able to perform.
Right.
And from there, we go to week 1 and choose the program that matches our starting rank.
Steve Speirs, the sadistic mastermind behind the challenge, claims that it’s possible to reach the 100 push-up mark in that six weeks, even if startng from my own level of astonishing lack of fitness.
Who is this guy, anyway? I’m all tired and wobbly from just looking at the website! But hey, a challenge is a challenge… and even a soft-bellied sloth can rise to a challenge, if you poke it hard enough with the mighty stick of potential public humiliation!
Whee-ha!
So… who’s in?
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