In June and July I fell so short of so many goals that I was setting for myself that I knew things had to change in August. I didn’t document things this month as much as I thought I would, but that doesn’t mean things weren’t going well.

In fact, I’m ending August very happy. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t a disaster. I set my mind to 3 goals and I hit every single one. I immediately want to talk about how I could have done even more, but I think that’s just a natural thing when actually hitting every goal. Here’s a look at how they all played out.

1,000 push-ups
Enlisting the help of friends on Facebook and a shared document was key to keeping me focused on this. There were times in the month that I thought my arms were going to fall off, but now that it’s done, I’m ready to do it again in September with more variety. I feel stronger and I can see the difference in the mirror.

All told I did 1,039 push-ups, hitting 1,000 with a couple of days to spare. The 10 of us who did the challenge did more than 10,500 total push-ups, with a few people needing to log the final few days. The women pretty much kicked everyone’s asses, but that’s one of the many fun aspects of this.

10 mile map

10 miles for a long run
It’s weird to have such low running miles for a month (61), but have my long run re-established at 10 miles (officially 10.1).

I normally wouldn’t recommend this approach, but having so many miles on my feet from the past few years and being injury free for a while now, it was worth the risk to increase my long run to double digits.

I knocked that out on Aug. 24, so that feels like a nice bonus to not have waited until the last possible day. Plus the weather was amazing that day for August.

Bike more than I run
I did 10 miles this morning to get to 67 for the month, beating out running by 6 miles. By running less in the past two months, I really got an urge to start running more in the second half of this month, and I debated on whether to drop this goal. After thinking about it the past couple of days I opted to forgo a long run today and close it out on the bike to mark all of these goals as DONE.

On to September
I have a few goals in mind for next month, but with a new baby coming SOMETIME during the month, I’m not quite sure yet how much I want to push myself. I had such a good time hitting August’s goals, that September may carry a similar theme.

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