… really hurts.

So, as I’ve been participating in the Hundred Pushup Challenge for the past 5 weeks or so, I’ve been getting a little bit of an ego boost in the form of arm and shoulder muscles that had been previously non-existent.  That ego boost has also been a bit of a pride boost. (Just picture me parading around the house in a sports bra and sweatpants flexing my arm muscles in front of every mirror – it’s actually kind of ridiculous.)

So, yesterday (on Easter Sunday, no less) as I sat with some of the youth from PLC at the Easter Pancake Breakfast, I was bragging (just a little, I swear!) to them about my buff arms and washboard (ha! not yet) abs from working out.  So of course on of them was like, “prove it!” and challenged me to an arm wrestling duel.  Well, being the competitive soul that I am, I had to take her up on the challenge and easily defeated her on the first try – piece of cake, right?  Yeah.  So then she told me I should arm wrestle Scott.  Since my ego had already been inflated at that point, and I was pretty confident in my new found arm strength, I took her up on the challenge and prepared myself to pin Scott’s arm to the table.

After several minutes of hard-fought battle, neither Scott nor myself were getting anywhere in the battle.  We were at a stalemate (and I was pretty proud of the fact that I was holding my own against my super buff fiance).  Then, perhaps in a moment of brilliance, that youth grabbed both our arms and pulled both down causing me to “lose” the match.

And that, my friends, is when I began to feel it.  Soreness began to creep into my shoulder.  Oh, the pain.  And today, it was multiplied.  My arm is weak.  I fear the gravity of the injury, so I’m waiting it out before I jump to go see a doctor about it.  Either way, I’m feeling the consequences of my pride, and if I can tell you one thing, I can tell you this: pride hurts in the end.

At the beginning of Lent, I thought it would be a good idea to use some of my newfound free time to improve my physical fitness.  After a gruelling orientation workout at Bally’s back in December, my eyes were opened to the fact that I just wasn’t as “in shape” as I used to be (if I ever was in shape in the first place) – so as Lent began I set out to improve my physcial fitness by taking up both the Two Hundred Situps Challenge and the One Hundred Pushups Challenge.  Each challenge is a six-week workout program designed to help you work from wherever you are to the point of being able to do exactly what the challenge states.

In my initial challenge at the start of the six-week challenge I was able to eek out a mere 26 crunches.  After the two-week exhaustion test I was up to 44, and slightly concerned that I wasn’t going to make it to the goal of 200 in six weeks.

Well, last night, after four weeks of the six-week program, i did it.  I set out to do my week-four exhaustion test, aiming for at least a hundred.  Well, I got to 100 and kept going… and going.

210!

It just goes to show you that anyone can improve their physical fitness.  I still plan to complete the six-weeks of workouts, and then aim to do 200 crunches three days a week after its over.

What’s next?  Maybe I’ll shoot for the Couch to 5k Challenge to improve my cardiovascular fitness.