We have progress. Kind of.

You’ll be bored to know that I am repeating the first week of the program yet again (this is my third time around), but to me it only makes sense that I shouldn’t move up to level 2 of doing pushups if I can’t complete level 1 yet, and in fact can’t even do a single standard pushup. As far as I’m concerned there’s no race to complete the program in a certain amount of time, and my main focus is that I want to get this right. Insert toddler walking/running metaphor here.

I’ve learned a couple of tricks that have helped, and as well I do believe I’m getting stronger. On Shaunte’s advice I have started doing my pushups on the floor, and indeed it has taken out a lot of the complications I was experiencing before. Now it’s just me against gravity, which is much simpler in terms of position and form, although obviously more difficult in terms of strength required. Today I attempted a boy pushup out of curiosity, and I discovered that I can sort-of kind-of do one if I stick my ass in the air (which is bad form, but I’m simply not quite strong enough to flatten out into chataranga yet). I was able to do a second pushup by using my hips as a hinge, which again is cheating, but I just wanted to see what was possible right now and what wasn’t.

It occurred to me that doing them the hinge way is pretty much the lifting equivalent of a girl pushup, so my second experiment was to try pushups on my knees. To my surprise, not only was I able to do them, I did 15 of them! This is a huge deal— I’ve never been able to do anything approximating a girl pushup before, much less multiple times. I’m definitely getting stronger.

So, to summarise:

• Boy pushups: I can do 1 if I cheat, and 2 if I really cheat on the second one;
• Girl pushups: I can do 15 without stopping, whereas for the past 35 years I could never do any at all, not even with the help of a personal trainer.

I’m thinking that by the end of the week, I’ll be doing real boy pushups, and maybe then I can move on to the second week of the program. I’m not going to cry if I have to repeat the first week a fourth time, though— I’m nothing if not patient.

How’s everyone else doing? Anyone getting close to three digits yet?

Click here to read the next part of the Hundred Pushups saga.

Click here to start reading the Hundred Pushups saga from the beginning.

A dream of sequins and gold lamé? Plzz, no.

Actually, up until recently we used to have this exact doorbell, and I can confirm that it does in fact sound like a screaming woman.

Way to give your kid body image issues:

They have names for people like you:

Leave Jerry resting in his grave, you perv.

Sour Hamerica— it’s one of my top ten must-see destinations:

I mean, if you’re sailing around the carif bean anyway, you may as well.

Category: you’re doing it wrong

If you’re striking out in soccer, might be time to switch sports.

And when I say “we,” I mean you, too— yesterday during Blogday 2008, fellow blogger Henry Michel (whom most of you know because he’s twitter-famous) chose melissamaples.com as his pick for “funniest blog.” Woo! Many thanks to him for that.

The article is in French, and I won’t bore you with a complete translation of how awesome I am, but the gist of the last paragraph is that half the awesomeness belongs to you guys— as Henry Michel rightly points out, most of the fun of the bazaar posts has to do with the banter we get going back and forth in the comments. Many times your captions are way funnier than mine, and I thank all of you for your contributions. The only correction I might make is that the article says I’m English (in reality my parents are German and I was born in the United States), but hey, I’ve lived so many places now (including the UK) that it’s all a blur anyway. Link

Bend over, Yale Team are going to take you somewhere:

It would be a shame if we missed that last show.