The Year of Push-ups
How 75,000 push-ups helped me finish my 85,000-word novel
Just finish it.
My wife said, with equal parts focus and encouragement, a kindred response to the rambling update I gave about how my novel was coming along. As a writer herself, she understood the challenge of finishing a long-form writing assignment. 110 12-point courier pages isn’t a screenplay without a third act; 85,000 words isn’t a novel without an ending.
Just finish it, then we’ll talk about structure and how to order the chapters.
It was what I needed to hear. I was frustrated. It was autumn, and I’d blown past my mid-summer goal of finishing my novel manuscript. In spite of all the improvements I made to the first 212 pages, I had avoided writing the ending. It was painfully long, overwritten in my head before I even drafted the outline. I wrote five different outlines across hand-written index cards and had bulleted lists of scenes with file names like “revised initial outline 2aB.” The last outline had so many font colors I had to create a key to recall whatever the hell cyan stood for. The more I plotted and planned, the further away the dreaded prose snaked out of reach, somewhere deep in the bottom of the writer’s cave of fears, laughing at the futility of my misguided, poor-quality reps.
Over Labor Day weekend, I pondered, why was it so hard for me to just finish the damn thing? I wrote consistently, 4-5 days per week. But I had been totally steadfast in sticking to a “Year of Push-ups” daily fitness challenge I started on January 1st. By that Monday, I wondered if I had sacrificed my writing goals for an arbitrary, self-imposed daily pushup goal. Instabro caption coach could work. A picture is worth ten hundred words, right?
Two weeks later, on a coaching call with my friend and fitness mentor, Mark Samuel1, he asked how my Year of Push-ups was going. It was late September, and I had a hundred days to go. My back and shoulders hurt most mornings. The novelty of doing push-ups every day faded in August once I passed 225 per day. I was proud of what I had done but was not fully confident I’d make it to December 31st. I asked him what he thought were the best next steps.
Now you gotta finish.
Four words. The simplicity of his message so perfectly echoed what my wife had told me about my manuscript. No instruction. No tactical tips on form or rest. Now you gotta finish.
Hearing the same message twice in two weeks helped something click.2 If I could finish the year of push-ups, I could finish the damn manuscript.
This is the story of how 75,000 push-ups helped me finish my novel.
I first heard about the Year of Push-ups during a college summer job at Rex Lumber in South Windsor, CT. As a handler, my job was simple: move large boards of specialty hardwoods—oak, maple, mahogany, and teak—from a pick pile to an order pile.
The handlers were a motley crew of characters in their mid-to-late twenties. Most spent their nights at the gym, softball field, or both. As a college kid, getting paid for work I did from the neck down was a welcome intellectual respite from crush parties and intramurals. Not surprisingly, I became quite the palooka, a flyweight in a ring of heavyweights; I absorbed some well-deserved shots for being spectacularly clueless about what I had gotten myself into.
Since I was in college, they started me in the mill. I fumbled boards rolling off the blanker and got plunked in the head by boards firing off the ripsaw conveyor belt. On my third day, for insurance reasons, they took their hard hat back, and I was transferred to the yard, where individual boards weighed twice what I did.
My struggle was comical. Marlboro reds flicked in the chuckling grins of the stoic, cowboy-like tallymen. My spit-shiny steel toes dangled in the air as I pushed my weight down on the end of a board, struggling to pivot it onto a pile.
One of the more seasoned handlers, Tommy, laughed along with them, but he always came to help me first. A tallyman in training, Tommy was hastily dismissive of his own intellect and quietly confident in his athletic abilities. On breaks and lunch, he inhaled a protein-forward mix of humble subsistence: cans of tuna and convenience store staples of beef jerky, boiled eggs, or both, hand-crumbled into his empty yogurt cup. A human Iroc-Z with a thinning mullet that flew from the back of his head like a spoiler, Tommy ran everywhere he went, often turning work tasks into yard games. He was a recovering addict, wore his heart on his sleeve, and recruited every guy in the yard to join in whatever trouble cured his boredom of eight hours of piling up boards. Forklift demolition derby, handstand contests atop a million-dollar pile of mahogany, kickball with rounded, reject knots of maple from the planer. Tommy was wise to keep his idle hands dirty with as much outer-circle dust as he could kick up.
One of Tommy’s safer, more inspiring activities was called The Year of Push-ups.
The goal was simple: do the number of push-ups for each day of the year. On January 31st, he did at least 31. By March 31st, he did 90. Tommy had attempted the Year of Push-ups every year since getting sober, shrugging off years when he missed a day for a buddy’s funeral or his daughter’s birthday at Mt. Tom water park. He offered only a passing admission that he had completed the year of push-ups six times in his ten years in recovery.
Some days, other guys in the yard joined him. During the summer, some even stuck with it for a few weeks. By autumn, his breaks were devoted entirely to push-ups. By the holidays, Tommy was the only one still doing push-ups during lunch and between orders, over 300 per day. His push-ups were so commonplace they faded into the background. Buyers from Steinway Pianos didn’t even look his way as they picked through custom piles of four-quarter white oak.
I was in awe of Tommy’s commitment to such a mundane exercise as the push-up. And so many of them. At a minimum, the Year of Push-ups is 66,795, a number he didn’t know when I asked and later calculated myself. Aside from breathing, I’m not sure I’d done 67,000 of any one thing over the course of my life, never mind a single year. I was mesmerized by the magnitude of it. Beyond the daily commitment and sheer volume of physical activity was the inherent design of the challenge. Each day, you have to do a little bit more than what was required the day before. On any given day, you can do more than the minimum. Fundamentally, the Year of Push-ups is a staircase; each day's floor is one rep higher than the day before. There are no rest days or dropping down below where you were previously. You’re always climbing.
After I graduated college, I tried the Year of Push-ups a half-dozen times. One time, I made it to June. But there was always something that derailed me. Bad luck on St. Patrick’s Day, too many margaritas on Cinco de Mayo. One time, it was a red-eye flight back to the East Coast to visit family. Excuses were always there; some were legitimate, all were easily rationalized. I’d try again next year. When I reached my mid-thirties, I stopped trying. My failures forced me to respect the discipline required. Whatever demons haunted Tommy, he was a proper badass for taking the fight to them every day.
To do the same thing every day of the year, even for a single year, is no-joke hard. Over 365 days, life can easily get in the way, even where a strong will exists. Motivation isn’t enough. You need discipline and luck. If you haven’t tried doing something daily for a year, try it. Doesn’t have to be push-ups. Even something like writing down what you’re grateful for, telling your teenager you love him—a consistent focus on one thing daily can help you appreciate and value each day. Daily push-ups with an increasing floor taught me more lessons than I could imagine: to appreciate health and physical ability, prioritize time within a given day, be present in a moment, the value in doing a bit more each day and, summarized below, some of what I learned about my own writing.
Stay Humble. In April, I felt like a proper madman. I could rip out 75 push-ups in three minutes and comfortably do 120 in under five. One of the sneaky parts of this challenge is if you get injured and need a day to heal, game over, start again next year. Supermans and Triple-claps are not how you finish the Year of Push-ups.3 In my writing, I realized how damaging it is to get hung up on a single character or plot point. Hours, days, or even weeks can be wasted trying to shoehorn in some scene or dialogue exchange you think is cool. Over the course of 85,000+ words, sacred cows can stampede you into a lot of corners. Stay humble about any individual story element. Finding consistency in broader elements like character motivation, cause-and-effect escalation of conflict, and tone helps the individual pieces fit together better.
Not every rep will be perfect. As I did my 75,277 push-ups,4 I knew many reps wouldn’t be perfect. Elbows out past forty-five, hips sinking by the end of a 40-count. Increasing focus on the whole vs. nitpicking flaws in a rep carried over to my writing. In the last part of my novel, it became increasingly easier for me to finish once I let go of trying to find the right pacing and which scenes to include, cut, or combine. I let myself use the same adjective four times on a page, left soap opera-tier lines of cringe dialogue, and finished scenes that I knew halfway through writing them would likely get completely cut. Knowing that many scenes would be far from perfect, I could better focus on the overall health of the story and finishing.
Consistently focus on the positive. Through the late spring and summer, I had 3-4 times when I tweaked something in my back and found myself thinking, “Don’t get hurt.” But by October, I had shifted my mindset to a mantra of “stay healthy.” I went from “don’t do bad reps” (double negative!) to focusing on what made a quality rep. I traded speed and upward force for balance and equal weight across all parts of my body. And my writing followed suit. When I sat down at night to read what I’d written that morning, I found myself looking for what I liked or could build on the next day vs. red-marking what to cut.
A good ending is hard. In any story or challenge, a good ending should be hard-earned. If the hero slays the dragon with a quick swipe of a toothpick, it is a complete letdown. I knew The Year of Push-ups would be difficult. I found mental comfort and confidence once I acknowledged it was harder than I imagined. This was how it should be. Physically, my shoulders, chest, and arms were tired. I don’t remember a morning in December when I didn’t wake up sore. For months, I experimented with different ways to do 300+ push-ups in a day, but I never found one “easy” way to do it. In writing, sometimes, you simply have to write the words. The tough scene, the chapter you’ve been avoiding. Words on a page, not too dissimilar from pushing the weight of your body up from the floor. Do it. Then do it again. Until you finish.
The biggest difference. For all the similarities and parallels I found between daily push-ups and writing as a daily exercise, it was the difference that scared me the most. Push-ups provide tangible, physical benefits. I felt myself getting stronger as I was doing it. The downside risk of "failing" was relatively minor and arbitrary. Even if I missed a day, the process had an inherent upside. With a novel, the time investment is massive, with zero promise of a positive return. Authors can spend years toiling over scenes, writing in circles, hundreds of thousands of words, with no guarantee their work will reach anyone in the way that they had hoped. It is a staircase that can crumble anytime, like the tree in the forest that nobody hears. The most important things in life – marriage, raising kids, or for Tommy, sobriety – can be more damaging than beneficial if not done thoughtfully, with discipline. But we go ahead and do them anyway. Even if nothing is guaranteed, the best things are worth the reps.
I thought about Tommy a lot over the course of last year. Each day of push-ups was a way for him to do something healthy and fight back against addiction in a way he was proud of. I’m not sure the push-ups served the exact same purpose for me. But they gave a form of sobering, time to think, free of the phone and other distractions. They also helped me build a healthy habit for daily writing, a way to show up and quiet the voices every day—or let them be heard. Some of my favorite nights last year were me on the floor, against the clock, doing push-ups at 11:48 to finish 265 before the clock struck midnight. Favorite mornings? Pre-dawn, my laptop screen as the room’s only light, music on, coffee, and my dog at my side. The scary prose can run, but if you put in the reps and write through the finish line, the long shadow of the cave dies in the light of your words.
Tim Denning often writes about the value of obsession,5 which both resonates and scares me. I believe obsession is the ultimate fuel to finish. But for me, obsession with a story results in distraction at inopportune and shameful times. Characters who, instead of slinking back into a cave, haunt you every waking hour, their voices echoing in your slumber, the way vices do for addicts. The obsession robs you of moments when you know your focus should be in the present. Yet you’re stuck in your story, missing something that matters, like an elderly parent’s recall of the day you were born or the increasingly loud plea by a child asking for help with her homework. I suspect many creatives walk a fine line between obsession and addiction. I’d like to think the difference is that the former can occur in the service of others while the latter is only for the solitary creative. I pray the Year of Push-ups provided me with a foundation for health that will benefit others beyond myself and that my daily fight for the right words ultimately inspires readers, as Tommy’s push-ups did for me.
On January 1st, 2025, I woke up in a swirl of soreness, accomplishment, and relief. Instead of planning when I’d spend forty-five minutes doing another 20 sets of push-ups, I carried a smile through the morning, grateful for the time I had back in my day to allocate to writing, rest, loved ones, or all the above. The Year of Push-ups was over. The weight of a big rewrite settled in my gut like a centering gravity; I felt grounded and stood tall over the cave.
Moments before I sat down to start writing, I slowly rolled my head around in the comfort of my hoodie, loosening the tightness in my shoulders and neck. I smirked and thought, you know what would loosen me up?
Not 367 push-ups!
I dropped down and gave the muse a good five. I got up, sat in my chair, and started typing. With the weight of the physical test removed and the beast of a rewrite before me, I felt energized and confident. There’ll come a time when the rewrite will be tougher than I expected.
Today, I’ll get some good words down. Tomorrow, a few more.
Keep pushing upward until it’s finished.
Credits: The two pictures of the camera-friendly ripped dudes doing push-ups are Christopher Campbell and Gordon Cowie, both via Unsplash. The last is an unedited, filter-free finalist for the book jacket when my novel is printed. Fair chance publishers push back on that.
Soundtrack: this story was written to the following songs, which may or may not have been played in a garage over copious amounts of push-ups:
Kickstart My Heart, Mötley Crüe
Protect Ya Neck (The Jump Off), Wu-Tang Clan
Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, Ramones
Ain’t Life Grand, Widespread Panic
Yes, there’s a glaring joke here about communication within marriage. The cliche’-for-a-reason advice to wives: if you want your husband to hear an important message, tell his buddy so he’ll remember every word. Jokes aside, I’d like to think there’s a divine harmony in the words of those who care about us. If it’s a song that needs to be heard, the DJ will keep playing it in all the octaves, sharps, and flats needed until you hear it. I was grateful this message was that kind of song.
Outside Magazine article: 14 Types of Push-ups. It was not featured in the Outside article, but I found Mike Tyson push-ups to be helpful in building total body strength.
While conducting "wellness workshops" for National Guard personnel in more than one dozen states in the 80's I attempted to perform their prescribed fitness test. At age 50 my two mile run was stellar but my pushups numbered 11 - no mistake, I barely made double figures. Began six days a week pushups with a goal of at least 300 per week. I hit 75,000 about every five years. Still pushing at 89.
…duuuuuude…i’m in…