Last year Dustin's older brother Mark, a US Marine, did 945 pushups in a row to raise money for the Marine Corps' Toys For Tots program. And then did 55 more the next morning to round his total up to 1,000.
This year, Dustin set out to break his brother's record, pledging to do a pushup for every toy donated, and every dollar donated to buy toys for needy local kids this holiday season. They set up in the parking lot at the local Subway, and Dustin's ordeal began in full swing.
There were several times, Dustin said, that he thought about quitting, or taking a nap. After the first 300 pushups, the exhaustion started to hit him. But the donations kept coming, and so Dustin kept going.
"I got down to the last thirty-five minutes and I was eighty-five push ups short of a thousand, so my dad started calling some family to getting some pledges," Dustin said. They ended up collecting 477 toys, and $690 cash. And Dustin broke his brother's record, doing a total of one thousand, one hundred and sixty seven push-ups!
"I will say that is the most push ups I've ever done in such a short time," young Dawson reported. "My arms felt numb the rest of the day. The next day my arms felt like jello."
But it's not the pushups Dustin thinks about now, "It's about the kids. How they will never know that I did push ups for them. They will never know where the toys came from. I will probably never know any of the kids who get the toys."
Which is fine with Dustin. "I have a warm heart thinking about all that and I guess now I understand why my dad volunteers so much," he said. "I can't wait to go Christmas shopping. What an amazing gift this is. To go shopping for all these kids."
