[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]

While writing yesterday’s post on accepting my friend Dave’s challenge to do one hundred burpees in thirty-seven minutes I ate a banana for energy and mentally prepared.

Then I turned on my stopwatch, started it, and did ten burpees. At three-and-a-half minutes I did ten more. At seven minutes ten more. By the end I felt good enough to do them faster. After my hundredth burpee I stopped the clock at just under twenty-nine minutes.

Coincidentally, Dave happened to text me right in the middle to answer my question from before that yes, he did do push-ups too. How did he happen to text in that half-hour?

I know doing something someone already did is easier than doing it first, which made my doing it faster easier. I also found sets of ten easier than I expected. That is, I found my eightieth, ninetieth, and hundredth burpees — the last in sets of ten — easier than my eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth in sets of twenty. I would guess doing burpees to exhaustion will make them more effective than spreading them out.

So the friendship aspect of my burpees continues. If you check my early burpee posts you’ll see I started doing them as an act of friendship more than as an exercise tool. Sure, they keep me in shape, but that’s a side effect of cultivating friendships with people who improve my life and support my goals and passions.

Incidentally, for these ten-thousand burpees at 2×20 daily or fifteen-thousand or so overall, my total cost remains exactly zero dollars. My number of injuries remains exactly zero. My days missed for rain, snow, equipment failure, and so on remains exactly zero.

The rest of the day and today

I felt pretty good the rest of the day. Dave texted me that his burpee muscles felt sore. Before going to sleep I didn’t feel I could count the extra morning sets toward my evening set so I did my usual twenty before going to bed.

Today I feel sore too, but it’s time to do my burpees, so I’ll post this and do twenty more.

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