For the first 26 years of my life, I was in terrible shape. Blame it on a number of factors: general laziness/apathy, lack of presence of male parental figure growing up, not possessing any innate athletic ability, ranch dressing is delicious, etc. I couldn’t run two blocks without being winded or do even five push-ups if you paid me.

And I totally, totally didn’t care. To me, being in-shape didn’t really matter much. I figured that the good Lord made it so people can only be good at so many things. Sure, I wasn’t in good shape, but I was (reasonably) smart and (somewhat) funny and had (unquestionably) excellent taste in music. And it’s not like I was morbidly obese or anything; there was nothing that I couldn’t do on a day-to-day basis that anyone else could do, like getting out of bed or climbing stairs or I don’t know, carrying a TV. If I was pretty good at three things and bad-but-not-disastrous at another, who gives a shit? As long as I was healthy enough for sexual activity, I was fine.

(Should any potential sexual activity present itself, of course.)

But then my grandmother died. No, this isn’t what you’re thinking: she was in her late 70′s, so it’s not like she died young. And no, it wasn’t as if death made me start thinking about my own mortality, like I should get my shit together and start getting healthy or I’d be next.

Instead, it was a picture from her funeral that made me change my perspective. My grandmom had six kids, and maybe, say, fifteen-plus grandkids (it would take me at least an hour to write down everyone’s names and figure out the exact number, but I just don’t have the time/strength/desire to do so). After the funeral, we gathered at a hall for food and drinks and all the grandchildren got together for a picture. I’m the second oldest (my cousin Michael’s maybe three or four years older than me), so at the time the grandkids ranged in age from 30 to about 8. I, being tall, found myself in the back row, smack in the middle. The picture was snapped and we carried on with the boozing.

A few days later, I saw the picture – and I was shocked. It didn’t look like a collection of grandchildren after their grandmother’s funeral. No, with my beard and chubbyness, I looked like the dad in the picture. No shit, I looked like the big, fat, bearded Mormon dad, and these were my fourteen children (even my older cousin Michael look younger than me, like my first-born son). And truly, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. There I stood, in the middle of the back row, big beard, big smile, and big belly, looking pleased at my brood.

Now, it just so happened that I had started one of my occasional pseudo-fad diets a few days before my grandmother’s death, but this was not unusual. Once a year, I’d go on a diet for a week or so, a diet which consisted of eating nothing the first day, eating a little more the second day, eating everything the third day, repeat two or three times. Then I’d give up and go back to my normal eating/gorging habits. And on these diets, the gym was hardly involved, if at all.

But things changed when I saw that picture. I decided that it was not right for a 26 year old man to look like the father of his 30 year old, 22 year old, 19 year old (etc) cousins. I was going to diet for real, for the first time – we’re talking calorie counting, gym attending, the whole shebang – and I was gonna drop 20 pounds.

The first day I went to the gym, I couldn’t run at all. So I just walked on an incline. A week or so later, I could run maybe .25 miles without stopping. Two months later (and with better eating), I was running three miles a day, five days a week, and had dropped about 35 pounds (all told, I think I went from 233 to 196 in a little over two months). Boom – just like that, I was much, much healthier, and perhaps even “healthy” for the first time in my life. And it felt great.

After the two months were up and I bottomed out at 196, I stopped being as hardcore with the gym and the diet. I knew I would gain a couple of lbs back, but that was fine, since I figured my ideal fighting weight to be around 210. 196 for a (6’1″) guy who practically made a living calling himself fat would not really work, anyway.

And for the next few years, I stayed around 210. Whenever I felt like I was getting chubbier, I’d do another temporary diet, but this time, it was much more hardcore: cut the calories and hit the gym, and I could drop those extra five or so pounds in a week or two.

[I did, however, balloon up when I moved to LA and a) stopped walking to work, b) spent 2.5 hours a day in traffic, and c) frequently took advantage of the multitude of new and exciting fast food options (i.e. In-N-Out, Carl's Jr, Jack in the Box, etc). But a diet competition after the New Year brought me back to normal size.]

So I could run. That much was settled. But I still wasn’t “strong.”

I had tried lifting weights at various points in my life, but they didn’t mesh well with my idiosyncrasies (bear with me). I don’t know if you’ve picked this up – whether you purchased my fantasy baseball secret sheet that had over 50+ total columns of data for hundreds of MLB players or read about how almost all of the 9500+ songs in my iTunes library have star-ratings – but I can be a little OCD. I like I stats, and I like them to be sortable and trackable. I enjoyed running in large part because I enjoyed tracking how much I ran, and I kept detailed spreadsheets listing how much I ran, listing miles run consecutively, total miles run, total distance covered, total calories burned, calories burned per mile, etc – there are 12 metrics by which I measure each run.

So I get psycho about this shit. I love stats, numbers, order. And with lifting weights, there are too many variables to keep track of. First, there are you four muscle groups: legs, back and biceps, shoulders and traps, chest and triceps (not to mention your core exercises). Then, of those four, they can be further divided into three to six exercises per muscle group (i.e. four workouts for your shoulders, four for your traps) and then broken down even further into sets (i.e. those four shoulder workouts each get three sets of 10 to 12 reps per set, etc).

Therefore, lifting weights was almost like information overload with me. Sure, maybe I need to take some medicine for this, but I was more worried about all the numbers I’d have to track – “ok, so this first set was 90 pounds times ten reps, the second was 80 times ten…” – than the actual exercises. I needed it to be simpler. Just writing about it makes me anxious, so yeah, maybe I should talk to a professional about this, but whatever.

Then I remembered how when I was kid my dad would tell me that Herschel Walker got to be the beast he was by doing 2000 push-ups and 2000 sit-ups a week and never touched a weight. Now, I didn’t want to be Herschel Walker, but that sounded simple and trackable, so, 25 years after he told me this, I decided to give it a try.

A few months back (in May, I guess), I started doing push-ups. The first time I tried, I did seven in a row before collapsing into a sobbing, shaking heap on the floor (and the last five of the seven may or may not have been head-nods). Seven push-ups, I have since learned, is really, really not good. So I backed the truck up and started really slowly, literally doing sets of two or three at a time, times four or five, to build my strength up.

About a week into my push-up regimen, I confided in a fit friend about my little plan, and he pointed me toward the One Hundred Push-Ups Program. And with this, my world was rocked.

A few months later, I no longer use the program (I have to be honest – I never got to 100 straight, as the most I could do consecutively was just shy), but I followed it religiously for many weeks. Now, I have my own maintenance program and try to do a crapload of push-ups a week (not quite Herschel Walker’s 2000, but comfortably in the triple digits per week). And so once again, in a matter of eight to ten weeks, I’d significantly changed (parts of) my body.

Now – and listen up, because this is important – do not misunderstand me when I say that I am still a train wreck naked. I do not want to give the false impression that I am fit or cut or sculpted in any way, shape of form. If anything, I went from looking like a sloppy 35 year old beer league softball player to looking like a sloppy 35 year old good beer league softball player – and that’s being generous. If you saw me last year or a few months ago and saw me again today, you would not notice a difference at all. So please, let’s be very aware of this, especially if you plan on seeing me naked in the future (read: you’re the hot half-Asian broad who lives on the ground floor apartment two doors away from me who I’m more or less going to show myself to naked, likely as soon as this weekend).

There’s no noticeable difference because of that ol’ apathy. If I wake up and I think, “You know what? I want nachos and butterfinger McFlurry for breakfast,” you’d better believe that I’m eating nachos and a McFlurry for breakfast (actually, a few weeks ago I had a chili cheese omelet and bread pudding for breakfast, so I’m really not joking here). So while I can become almost psychopathicly obsessive when it comes to running or the push-ups, I make no concessions in other parts of my life to achieve any further fitness. I just want to be able to run and do the push-ups and eat as much sour cream as I want, whenever I want. I think this is fair, no?

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But the problem is that I peaked with the running and with the push-ups separately. Meaning, when I could run like the wind, I couldn’t bench press a medium-sized dog; now that I can lift a small car, I’d be afraid to start crossing a one-way street on a yellow light.

(I’m exaggerating of course, but you get it.)

This is where the 3-50 Fitness Challenge comes in.

I think that the minimum fitness requirement for a human being with a penis to call himself a “Man” is that he must be able to, at any given time, run one mile without having to stop and do 20 consecutive push-ups. I know, I know – this is a bold statement for someone who still kinda believes in Santa and sobs uncontrollably whenever those bride shows are on WE. So I know I’m about the last guy to set minimum fitness standards for what it means to be a “Man” (capital M).

But if you think about it, one-mile/20 push-ups is a pretty good rule. It might sound like nothing, but it’s harder than you think. Also, the catch here is the “at any given time” part. Sure, you might be able to run a mile and then drop and give me twenty after you’ve warmed up at the gym or are chock-full of cocaine and red bull, but what about if I came into your office at 10:30am on a Tuesday and asked you to do it? Or what about 9:14pm on a Wednesday night, between commercials for “So You Think You Can Dance?” That’s the key.

(To be clear, there are limits to the “at any given time” clause. For example, if you fed Usain Bolt sixteen Red Stripes and a pound of goat meat curry, even that mutha might not be able to run a mile straight. So the “at any given time” clause does not apply to certain special situations, like immediately after Thanksgiving or after drinking a goodly amount of alcohol.)

But this is the first level, the minimum level of Man fitness. And believe it or not – and I know this may come as a shock to a number of you – I can do this. I’m confident that at any given time, I can run a mile and drop and give you 20. And yes, I’m the say guy who “failed” gym sophomore year of high school and had to go to summer school for one day to shoot hoops. Not my finest moment. Or year. Or several years, really. Let’s move on.

The next level of Man fitness is if one can do a two-mile run and 35 consecutive push-ups at any given time. Now we’re getting serious. You might think, “Meh – what’s another mile and a few more push-ups?”, but this level separates the Men from the, um, lesser Men. If you can do this, you are definitely in pretty good shape (unless you’re a junkie who happens to be good at running and push-ups).

Ol’ Uncle Jason is close here, but again, there’s that whole “at any given time” thing. I feel like under optimal conditions and with some very, very loud Motley Crue, I could pull this off. However, I think I need a few more weeks (like four to six) of steady work before I can consider myself graduated to this level, before I feel comfortable that I can do this whenever, wherever.

Finally, there’s the third (and for our purposes, final) level: to be able to run three miles straight and do 50 push-ups consecutively. Hence, the 3-50 Fitness Challenge.

This, my friends, is what I’m shooting for. Maybe it’s me – and I’m sure I have a bunch of fit friends who can do this easily – but I think that I’d be in pretty good shape if I could take off on a three-mile run and drop and do 50 push-ups – again – at any given time. I’ve done each of these separately and under optimal conditions, but to do them one after the other and whenever is required is the issue here. If I can pull this off, realizing that it will take me at least two months to be able to bang out the 3-50 on a regular basis, I’d consider myself a pretty bad-ass dude and thus, likely to have more frequent (and hopefully less bizarre and financially devastating) sexual encounters.

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I know that there are some who might take umbrage with this plan, particularly those who are extremely strong. For example, maybe you can bench 300 pounds fifteen times but couldn’t run two miles straight if your life depended on it. Does this make you any less of a man? Of course not. Personally, I felt it was important to having the running in there, to get that aerobic exercise and work the ol’ heart and lungs, because in my case my diet breaks down like:

- 40% foods with the word “cream” in them
- 32% something that was once alive and but is dead now and has cheese on it
- 23% alcohol or other poisons
- 4% other (mostly foods I take from the fridge, think might be stale, eat or drink, and then realize are stale)
- 1% all of the above

So again, this is a personal thing, for me and me only (I mean, you’re welcome to try, but that’s not the point here).

It’s just that I need goals. When I set out on that first diet to lose 20 pounds in two months after my grandmom’s death and the “Dad Picture,” I lost over 30. When I got fat(ter) in LA, my buddy John and I had a diet competition and I crushed him, running almost 100 miles in the last few weeks of the competition. When I finally nailed down the push-up thing and was doing that 100 Push-Up challenge, I was doing more push-ups in one afternoon than I previously had done in the first 28 years of my life combined (which is, sadly, not an exaggeration, and speaks more to my lack of strength back then than my current strength now).

Alternatively – and I know you’re probably sick of me talking about the book, but this is pertinent to our discussion – when I first started writing the book, I took a four month leave of absence from work. The book needed to be at least 60,000 words. In those four months off, with absolutely nothing to do, I wrote 10,000 words. To give you an idea, when I was at the peak of my posting, I was writing over 10,000 words a week (this very post will be about 3000 words). And yet, in four months off, I lost direction, did nothing, and wrote only 10,000 words total.

Then, suddenly, I went back to work. And, suddenly, the book deadline was only six weeks away. So in those six weeks, while working full-time, I wrote something like 55,000 words (mostly by getting out of the city on the weekends). 55,000 in six weeks while working full-time; 10,000 in four months while having absolutely nothing to do.

So I need that pressure, need that routine, need that light of the end of the tunnel. And finally, I’ve found two things – the running and the push-ups – that are trackable and allow me to set specific numerical goals to work perfectly with my OCD re: stats and numbers. It may not be the most orthodox fitness regime, but, for me, it’s likely to be the most successful.

(Wish me luck. Like, a lot of it.)