You remember my post about how I was planning to keep up my workouts in the face of the crushing amounts of work during my comprehensive exams?   

Oh yeah, sure.  Not at all.  I worked out maybe six times in the whole month.  If I flunk, maybe I can blame the poor blood circulation to my brain due to my inactivity.

I am back at it, finally.  I'm trying not to be bummed about some of the strength I've lost.  My bench press is down from a not-so-impressive 85 lbs. to an even less impressive 75lbs.  

I'm also running, after a fashion.  I decided the hell with this not running crap.  I'm doing the Couch to 5K plan, and just icing my knee after.  I plan to do a Reindeer Run 5K in December.  I can tell you now that I'm not going to be shaving my 5K time from earlier this year, as I had hoped.  Ah, well.

A bunch of the bloggers on running blogs that I follow have done or are doing the hundred push up challenge. I've finally decided to join in the fun. It will be fun, right?

I already do push ups as part of my warmup when I lift weights. When I did my initial test, I managed 26. That put me in column 3 for week 1.  I've finished the first week, and my max today (after doing sets of 15, 13, 10 and 10) was 21.  There's not another test until after week 2, so we'll see how much better I do after another week of this.  I'm hoping that, if nothing else, this will help me improve my bench press.

I will say that my bench press has gotten better over the past few months.  I can now reliably do ten reps of 85 lbs.  On a good day, I can even do a few reps of 95.  I'm really looking forward to being able to put those 25 lb weights on my bar more often.  I get to feel so much more butch.  Rawr.

I also cut four minutes off of my mile swim this week.  I did it in 46 minutes instead of 50, so we're not talking about scorching speed.  Still, I guess you take what you can get.