Escaping a Funk: Part 1

I’ve been in a funk for a couple weeks now. It’s funny how you never really notice yourself entering one. It kind of sneaks up on you and it’s only after a while that you notice you’ve had a serious case of the Mondays for quite some time.

Not like there’s any secret behind how I got here. Like the vast majority of this country, I’ve been sheltering in place at home for the better part of 2 months. Outside a handful of trips to the grocery store and gas station, my life has been stripped down to the bare minimum. It’s almost like I’m living the movie Groundhog’s Day. Only that’s not completely accurate. Bill Murray kept living the same day over and over again, but he did different things each time around. Heck, he even learned how to play the piano and ice sculpt. In reality, I’m living the anti-Groundhog’s Day. I’m living different days, but doing the same thing each day.

So in order to break out of my funk, I need to start doing different things. I figured a good start would be to take on an exercise challenge during the month of May. I decided on three criteria as I thought about this.

• Personally meaningful.
• Something that would be outside my comfort zone.
• Achievable.

In the end, I settled on doing 1,000 pull-ups and 2,000 push-ups during the month of May.

I’ve always thought of pull-ups and push-ups as the most basic of fitness exercises. They’re challenging, yet easy to do without a lot of equipment or skill. I try and work them into my cross-training, however it’s been years since I’ve done them consistently. Typically, I’ll do a set a day once or twice a week though there are times where I’ll go a couple months before doing either.

And I’m all about the round numbers. So setting myself a goal of doing an even thousand really resonates with my on an almost subconscious level. Five hundred would be a great target, however I’m more likely to achieve a cool grand than half that just because I have a greater desire to hit the rounder number.

Initially, I was thinking this would be a modest stretch goal based on what I have done in the past. Then I went and looked at my old training logs. Turns out I’ve never done more than four hundred and change of either pull-ups or push-ups in a given month. I was surprised as there was a period where I was doing these every day. I figured I would have gotten close to a thousand at some point. I mean it’s only 32 per day. That doesn’t sound too bad. Especially if you space them out into five or six sets over the course of the day. Nice thing about working from home is you can walk over and easily knock out a set every couple hours or so. How hard can that be?

Um. How about pretty hard. I was able to get six sets of 5 pull-ups and 10 push-ups done yesterday, however it was far from easy. And here we are at dusk on day #2 and I’ve still only done five sets of 5 and 10 so far. My last set was a bit of a chore and I’m a little worried that I might have to break up my last set or just come in a little short for today.

Looks like this is going to be quite a challenge. Perfect.