File under "Pathetic"

Last night I went for my first run in about three months. It was an abysmal failure. The photo below was taken right after I got home. It's annotated to show a few of the things that went wrong with me. I don't have a rear view shot so I didn't include anything about the back pain that kicked in on my walk home (yes, I had to walk home) and this shot cuts off at the thighs so I couldn't call out any knee or foot issues. Just horrible. Click to enlarge if the type is too small.


A couple of the people who will see this (or about 50%) know that I am involved in a push-up contest for this year (a year for which, incidentally, my motto is "Takin' it to a whole nother level in 08"). At Christmastime, I cranked out 24 to set my baseline for the year. A couple of months ago, I put up 30 while on a phone call with my co-competitors, my sisters and my Dad. Then I put the push-ups down for a couple months. After yesterday's disgraceful foray back into the wonderful world of exercise, I decided to see today what I could do in the push-up department:

I didn't exactly set the exercise world on fire, but it was a better performance than yesterday's and it's good to have a new baseline, something on which to build. I'm posting this video and letting people see where I'm at and also committing to posting an update one month from today. My hope is that this small promise will give me the motivation to keep practicing since it would be embarrassing to do no better in a month than I did tonight.

We'll see how that works out, considering that I have about five readers, all of whom have seen me in considerably more embarrassing situations than a poor push-up performance would constitute.