#stjude – The Thirteenth Hour

The Thirteenth Hour Podcast #407: Reflections of the St. Jude’s Pushup Challenge and Thirteenth Hour Reading

https://archive.org/download/podcast-407/Podcast%20407.mp3

Today’s episode is about a push-up challenge I have been doing this month. At the start of May, I committed to doing 3000 push-ups for St. Jude’s Hospital, which offers free treatment for children and young adults for conditions once considered terminal / hopeless (hence, St. Jude – apparently patron saint of hopeless causes)! Even though that is no longer the case for most of these conditions, for some people without health insurance coverage or the means to access treatment, they might as well be, which is why organizations like St. Jude’s are so helpful. They do, however, depend on grants and donations to stay afloat, so if you are some inclined, please consider contributing to the cause here! https://www.facebook.com/donate/1287747998791772/?fundraiser_source=external_url

I’m also matching all purchases made of the handmade resin 3.75” Rocketeer action figures on my Etsy store (all of which normally goes to the Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation in memory of Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens) with a matching donation to St. Jude’s. Each figure comes with its own protective case and access to an exclusive interview with Billy Campbell, the Rocketeer from the 1991 film. https://etsy.me/3ZXRPq

So, two ways to support a good cause!

As for push-ups … well, to me, they have always been the sort of exercise that pretty much anyone with arms could do. They don’t require any equipment, they take very little time, and are a pretty good overall upper body / core exercise that uses a lot of large muscle groups at once. I’ve been doing them for years in various capacities so included a few references to them when writing The Thirteenth Hour, e.g.:

“Now everybody drop for pushups! Fifty! Count’em, loud!”

When my arms began to tremble at thirty, the beefy officer immediately noticed and threw me a menacing glance. At forty five, just as my arms were about to give out, I heard the officer mutter something about “these damned kids” while he grabbed the back of my collar and rammed my chest down into the mud.

“Down!”

With another yank, he yelled, “Up! I don’t hear you counting, dammit!”

As I struggled to spit out mud, he bellowed, “Forty–six!”

“Down!” Another faceplant into the mud.

“Up! I can’t hear you!”

“Guuggh. Forty–seven?”

And all the way to fifty. Even though he was helping me, those last three were the hardest three pushups of my entire life. As I lay there, trying to catch my breath without swallowing undue amounts of mud, I looked up to see a man next to me. He towered so far over me that I couldn’t quite see his head completely. I felt even smaller than I had when I’d left Aurora in the orphanage.

He said, “Nice way to start off. Thanks for embarrassing us. Nobody, I mean nobody, embarrasses me. Or shames where I come from,” he said, hacking on the ground and kicking dirt into my face. He was an Aquarian, and that was the Aquarian way of saying you wanted to fight. Classy, huh?

I didn’t have a whole lot of fight in me after those pushups. Never mind that it wasn’t all that fair to begin with, him being so much bigger. It was all I could do but roll over and pant up at the sky…