J: Alright, are we recording? Cause I want to make my, I want to make my joke. So this is gonna surprise you Chris, but I've actually never had any formal tennis training. 

C: Really?

J: That was my joke.

C: Did you work all night on that one?

J: Yeah.

[100 Days Intro]

John: [voice over] Welcome back to 100 Days. So on Day 73 we ditched the coaches and experts and just went to play some tennis at the local Jewish community center. 

J: Guys, I am not a great tennis player.

John: [voice over] Just like the pros, we warmed up for a little bit before launching into our first set. 

J: I don't know if you remember my serve, Chris, but it is a thing to behold. 

John: [voice over] I reeled off two early game victories and was feeling pretty confident, but then Chris remembered how to serve. 

C: I gonna rain the thunder down right here.

J: I'm waitin for it. Augh, great shot. Not much I can do when those are goin in. 

John: [voice over] And that resulted in, uh, 12 consecutive defeats.

J: Lost my mojo.

John: [voice over] But I didn't mind much. We had a great time, the only problem was that because we were so bad at tennis the rallies were very short. I don't think it was probably as aerobic as it is for, ya know, like, Andre Agassi or Pete Sampras or Steffi Graf. By the way, my tennis references show my age. Tennis for me ended around 1999 except for Serena Williams. 

J: I have never had any formal tennis training, I don't know if I told you guys that already. But, this is all, like, pure intuition. 

John: [voice over] All in all, this was not as fun for me as ping pong because I'm better at ping pong. Plus, when you hit the ball way off the court, which I've done a few times in my career, you don't have to go so far to chase it down in ping pong. 

J: I mean there's two ways they can shoot this: the way that makes us look like heroes, or the way that makes us look like fools.

C: It's a lot easier to it one way than the other.

J: Yeah, I mean so one of the things that I think that will surprise the viewers of this show is that I've never actually had any formal tennis training. You take different things from different tennis professionals and you put it all together and that's how you get my tennis game. 

C: F*ckin majestic.

J: Yeah, no, it was somethin else. When you get your first serve in, you are essentially unstoppable. 

C: Ya know, but I really have no technique. I don't have any idea what I'm doing, like, I'm sure like, people who know tennis will see, like, how I'm doing and be like, what, what're, what is he doing? All I do is just throw it up and hit it as hard as I can.

John: [voice over] So in the end, when it comes to racket sports, Chris and I are tied. I'm slightly better at ping pong, he's slightly better at tennis. 

J: Feel like you could have done that every time.

John: [voice over] After our match we had like 5 minutes left in our court rental and Chris and I jokingly discussed doing suicides, and then we did them.

C: That was self directed too. That was just two guys who wanted a little more. 

J: Yeah.

C: Wanted to push the envelope a little harder.

J: If you have an hour to exercise, you should use the hour. That's how I feel at this point, I mean, it's better to use the hour than it is to knock off early.

John: [voice over] On the food front I'm working hard to stick to my word on taking lots of food pictures, so here's my Day 73 food, and no pictures from Chris, so enjoy some unflattering photos of him.

John: [voice over] On Day 74 we were back in the gym with Laura. For the record, I was still sore from Daily Method. We began with some metric checks - my resting heart rate was 60, and Chris' was 52. And then we did our usual half mile on the tread mill, after which mine had risen to 148, and Chris' only up to 116. My goal for this day was to make it to 40 push ups in one minute, and I was so close with 39, but I will get there. Chris basically got to 43, but we're gonna call it 42.5. Then we did planks right after push ups, because we keep forgetting to separate them, but I still made it to 1 minute and 35 seconds, and Chris to 3 minutes, 15 seconds.

Then Laura had us split up and go to different sides of the gym. Was she sick of us and our hilarious banter about how f*cking majestic we are? Probably. Anyway, there were stations on both sides and we did 10 reps at most of them. It was a combination of aerobic and anaerobic exercise. I started on side 1 doing perfect push ups, and then jump squats, and burpees, rows, high knees and more. Meanwhile Chris was doing push ups, rope jacks, knee tucks, lunges, and of course also burpees. 

After 10 minutes my heart rate had risen to 158, Chris' was at 130. That's pretty high for me, so Laura was keeping a close watch on mine, but Chris' heart rate is always bizarrely low. So then we switched sides. Chris was not a fan of these hurdles. It's not his fault that he's so tall. This workout was really hard in general, because there were no breaks. It was just 10 straight minutes of very difficult work and I was just barely able to finish each side. I was really at my limit the whole time.

And then we had to do each side again, but the first time was for 6 minutes, and the next for 4 minutes. I mean my shoulders were exhausted, my core was exhausted, but, I came into that day with all these work stresses pinging around in my mind, and an hour later they weren't bothering me anymore.

That's kind of the miracle of exercise for me. Like, I would rank this workout in my top 5 hardest of 100 Days so far, but I was grateful for it. At the end, we tested our forward folds. Chris is now 1 and 3/4 inches from his wrist to the floor, and I'm 10.5 inches away from my toes, so, still some work to do. 

Here's some of my food from Day 74. we did go out this evening, so I had some beer, a grilled chicken sandwich and mini pretzels, but that's not a big deal in the scheme of things, and it's really important that I can slip up and still say 'okay, that's not ideal,' rather than catastrophizing.

John: [voice over] On Day 75 I went for a 35 minute jog on my treadmill, and then this happened.

J: Feeling some kinda somewhat persistent, uh, soreness in my left shin. So I'm gonna stop, and, uh, just rest it and hope that it gets better.

John: [voice over] And, yeah, after that my knee also started to swell up, so I went ahead and made an appointment with Dr. Henry for next week. Here's some of my food for the day. 

John: [voice over] The next day was a Saturday, and I went out with Chris so thanks to me, he has extra meal pictures. He's also keeping up with his self directed exercise and went on a 5 mile run.

In general, aside from my leg, I feel great. My body hasn't felt this good maybe ever. Certainly not since, like, 7th grade. In the last couple weeks I've become really aware that for most of my life, I've thought of my body as an antagonist to myself. When I was in high school that manifested itself in behaviors that were destructive to my body, like smoking cigarettes. And then as I got older, I just tried to ignore my body as much as possible. But now I find myself feeling like my body isn't the enemy of myself, it's part of myself. And that's weirdly liberating for me because I don't feel so stuck with it.

I'm still meditating and I still feel meh about it, but maybe it's working because mental health-wise I continue to see big progress. This week was pretty relaxing and I could really focus on myself. 

I have definitely learned in the last 75 Days that no matter how much I exercise and meditate, if I overextend myself with work and other obligations, I'm going to pay the consequences. But this week I didn't do that, which also had consequences, just good ones.

I read recently that instead of saying 'I don't have time for that' you can think of it more as 'that's not a priority for me right now' because that's what 'I don't have time' really means. Ya know, it means you're prioritizing other things. I don't want to put myself in a situation where I don't have time to meet the basic needs of my health. Of course I also want to prioritize time with my family, and work has a way of making itself into a priority, but I can't do any of those things well if I'm not healthy. And I really feel like in these last few weeks of 100 Days I will be most success if I can prioritize nutrition the way I'm currently prioritizing exercise. 

Thanks for watching. I'll see you on Day 77.

[credits screen]

J: You know how they say, like, it's like 70 percent hard work, and 30 percent talent? I've got the 30 percent, it's the 70 percent I'm working on.