So I started doing this challenge where by the end of six weeks, I’m supposed to be able to do 100 push-ups…

If you’re anything like me, the thought of doing 100 of just about anything is enough to bring sweat to your brow and make you reach for another cold can of Diet Coke in defeat, but in the name of fitness and weight loss and not being mistaken for Santa Claus whenever I wear red out in public for the next two months, it seemed like as good of a shot as any with New Years rapidly approaching and one particular resolution about an unfortunately large waistline that could still use a little work to wrap up.  The idea is actually pretty simple – you start off doing barely any at all, and then slowly add a few more reps each week until six weeks later you’ve got triceps the size of Christmas hams and you’re able to woo all the ladies through three layers of flannel with your amazing pecs!

Anyways, the concept was enough to intrigue me when I first came across it because just between you and me, I’ve never really been very good at doing push-ups.  Sure, we were expected to do them in gym class throughout the years, but not for nothing, we were also expected to be able climb that giant net that hung from the ceiling thirty feet up in the air, and yours truly probably never saw more than the first five feet of that sucker before slumping back to my spot on the floor to watch as my superior classmates who were actually born with upper body strength shimmied to the top like it wasn’t the scariest thing this side of catching cooties!

Surprisingly enough, not being able to climb a net hasn’t really held me back all that much in my adult life as my balding gym teacher would’ve liked me to believe…

Of course, my first week started out a bit modest, which is the polite way of saying laughable – you begin by taking a test to see how many push-ups you can do already to determine which “rank” you fall into going forward.  I did a whopping 4, which categorized me in rank #1, aka Rank “Are you sure you actually took the test?” Still, believe it or not things are actually looking up at the end of said week, with my final set boasting an impressive 6 push-ups in a row, not to mention a jaw-dropping 23 push-ups completed over the course of 5 sets!

Hey, a week ago I doubt I could’ve completed 23 push-ups over a million sets, so at this point I’ll take whatever progress I can get.

Who knows – another five weeks from now, you might not even recognize me anymore, as my Popeye-esque mus-cles skyrocket me into a world where t-shirts fit just a little bit tighter in a good way and guys no longer have to ask their wives to open pickle jars for them, where there just so happens to be a gun show happening every day, and where if I just so happened to wander by my old elementary school and ran into that old fart of a gym teacher of mine, I could totally climb that cargo net now if I really wanted to!

Tomorrow officially marks the start of week #2, so if you hear a faint cry from elsewhere around the globe that sounds like a guy whose arms are disintegrating under the weight of his own bulk, know that it’s just me toiling away at the challenge that is destined to either make me or break me … well, probably break me, but in the off chance that it makes me, then it will have all been worth it.

Have you ever noticed that 100 is a really big number???