Pushups

As I inch down the long list of stuff to do in my new home, paddling and exercise continue to be minimal these days.  But I did get out in the surf ski for 60 minutes yesterday.  The Memphis gauge reading for the Mississippi was a tenth of a foot above zero.

I'm also trying to get back into a strength routine as a new racing season looms out there on the horizon.  This month I'm keeping it simple: pushups.

This past Monday, I did 100 pushups in sets of ten.  I repeated that Wednesday and yesterday, and hope to do it every other day for the rest of November.  I'm trying to work in a variety of hand and foot positions, Hindu pushups, and so on.  As the month goes on I'll increase the number of reps per set, depending on how I'm feeling.

This idea was inspired by a murderer.  In college I had a friend in the law school who worked in a legal clinic for indigent clients, and much of his time was spent helping an inmate on death row navigate the appeals process.  This inmate was unbelievably strong and spent the long hours in his cell working out.  Having lost his weight room privileges because he had killed another inmate there, his routine included doing a thousand pushups a day.

If I could manage a thousand pushups a day--and I have serious doubts about that--it would require a significant portion of my day to complete.  Maybe I would do fifty sets of 20 reps, or forty sets of 25... however I did it, each set would require an adequate recovery interval, and I've just got too much to do as long as I'm not incarcerated.  So for now, ten sets of ten is it.  We'll see how this little experiment develops.