Real David H.

In June and July I fell so short of so many goals that I was setting for myself that I knew things had to change in August. I didn’t document things this month as much as I thought I would, but that doesn’t mean things weren’t going well.
In fact, I’m ending August very happy. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t a disaster. I set my mind to 3 goals and I hit every single one. I immediately want to talk about how I could have done even more, but I think that’s just a natural thing when actually hitting every goal. Here’s a look at how they all played out.

1,000 push-ups
Enlisting the help of friends on Facebook and a shared document was key to keeping me focused on this. There were times in the month that I thought my arms were going to fall off, but now that it’s done, I’m ready to do it again in September with more variety. I feel stronger and I can see the difference in the mirror.

All told I did 1,039 push-ups, hitting 1,000 with a couple of days to spare. The 10 of us who did the challenge did more than 10,500 total push-ups, with a few people needing to log the final few days. The women pretty much kicked everyone’s asses, but that’s one of the many fun aspects of this.

10 miles for a long run
It’s weird to have such low running miles for a month (61), but have my long run re-established at 10 miles (officially 10.1).

I normally wouldn’t recommend this approach, but having so many miles on my feet from the past few years and being injury free for a while now, it was worth the risk to increase my long run to double digits.

I knocked that out on Aug. 24, so that feels like a nice bonus to not have waited until the last possible day. Plus the weather was amazing that day for August.

Bike more than I run
I did 10 miles this morning to get to 67 for the month, beating out running by 6 miles. By running less in the past two months, I really got an urge to start running more in the second half of this month, and I debated on whether to drop this goal. After thinking about it the past couple of days I opted to forgo a long run today and close it out on the bike to mark all of these goals as DONE.

On to September
I have a few goals in mind for next month, but with a new baby coming SOMETIME during the month, I’m not quite sure yet how much I want to push myself. I had such a good time hitting August’s goals, that September may carry a similar theme.