Slow progress, but progress nonetheless

Despite Thanksgiving, I did manage to drop a pound from a week ago. I am still using Daily Plate, mostly honestly -- though it fell apart over the last couple of days of our trip. And I went running twice and walking once and did some walking by accident one other day (we were looking for a lost rocket -- never did find it, but I picked up a lot of steps in the process) so my exercise wasn't too bad. This week I have four appointments at the gym, though our weekend trip will be another challenge.

My push-ups are back to improving. I got stuck at 40 as my max for a while; it doesn't help that I'm only managing about two days a week instead of three on the program. But I just finished up week 5, and in that week you switch from 4 long sets and a max set to 7 shorter sets and a max set, and for some reason that's the boost I needed, because yesterday I did 50. Ish. It was really 49 with sort of a caving-in, last one tagged on to reach that magic number. I have an exhaustion test coming up on Wednesday, where you just try to do as many push-ups as you can without stopping, so we'll see how I do. Last time I did one of these I didn't get any further than my previous day's max! I am amazed that I could even make it to the vicinity of 50; at my peak in past years, I could only do 20 in a set, and 50 TOTAL on the day. Yesterday my total was 200! The only thing really holding me back at this point is my ability to keep my core muscles engaged (to use the buzz-words from the exercise videos these days) -- in short, I have to keep my ab muscles tight to keep my back from aching, but if I do that, after a while I forget to breathe.

We're into December now -- on the 10th let's start 12 Days of Fitness, where we get 12 days of exercise in before Christmas, preferably 12 different activities -- different machines, different environment (treadmill and road walking/running are different) to shake us out of any rut we may be in.