20,000 pullups in 2011

Carl and @PabloCheesecake are two fat blokes who have set themselves the target of doing 20,000 situps (each) by the end of the year. M. Cheesecake set himself the target of cycling 500 miles in 2010 and achieved it, and by some fat-gentleman’s agreement they have set themselves a situp target. To help motivate and keep on track, they are raising money for the Stroke Association. I encourage you to go and donate.

I hate situps. I’m not very good at them, and I think they’re a bad exercise. I’d rather strengthen my core by doing compound exercises which force me to keep good core stability. Barefoot running is surprisingly good for this. I would, however, like to be better and pullups.

Therefore, I’ve set myself a goal, too. I randomly bought a pullup bar in Tesco the other night (one which doesn’t need screwing into the door frame, and is fairly portable):

I had a think about it, and think that 16 per day is reasonable to start with. Say, 8 in the morning and evening, broken into sets of 3 or 4.

The problem then was to work out a reasonable target to be able to do by the end of the year. I’m expecting to regret this, but I want to be able to do 100 pullups in one day by the 31st December 2011. I could have got all fancy and dredged up some actual maths, but instead I just plotted it on a graph and worked out what I need to increase by each day to hit 100 by then.

Then, add them all up. It Comes to 20,432. That’s not a very nice number, so I’ll round it down to 20,000. I think that’s quite ambitious enough, and allows me to not hit my targets and/or have recovery/sick days occasionally.

I’m tracking my progress in a spreadsheet on Google Docs, embedded here by magic (or something), target in blue, progress in red:

Running total:

I haven’t quite decided what I should do about sponsorship. It would certainly help motivate, but I’m torn between The Stroke Association and The British Heart Foundation. Any ideas?