Running, I guess...

I've never enjoyed running.  Mind you - I (usually) enjoy exercising, and if I'm participating in an athletic activity that happens to incorporate running (for instance racquetball), I've got no problem with that, but I've never enjoyed running for running's sake.

With regards to the sports I participated in during high school, running during practice was something that was endured (and quite often dreaded) in order to build stamina and speed.  In football, we would run a number of 40 yard sprints at the end of practice before heading in (usually 15 or 20 of them).  Sometimes only 10 if it was the day before a game, but if we had not practiced well, it could be as many as 20 or 30.  Wrestling practice meant running stairs, and not just at the end of practice, but also at the halfway point.  Off the cafeteria (where we would roll out the mats for practice), there was a 2-flight stairwell.  We would usually run up and down that bitch 25 times in the middle of practice, and then again at the end.

So I came to see running as a "necessary evil" if I wanted to get or stay in shape.  Way back in the day (and we're talking late 80's/early 90's here), if I was going to "work out", that basically consisted of my running a mile and timing myself to gauge my progress.  It would take anywhere from 7 to 10 minutes depending upon what kind of shape I was in, and I'd call it a day.  (Wow - 10 minute workout there big guy, I'm baffled as to how you managed to balloon up to over 300 lbs.)

Well, I saw that a color run is coming to our area in a couple of months, and I'm not sure what got into me, but I somehow thought this might be a cool challenge to put out there for myself.  I've read a number of posts where people talk about going through a "Couch to 5K" program, that takes you from a non-runner to running a 5K in about 8 weeks.  Of course, there's a (free) iPod app for it as well:

My daughter became interested in the color run when I mentioned it, so today we both did "week 1, day 1" on the app.

Look how easy day one is supposed to be - alternating between 1 minute of running and 90 seconds of walking, but son of a mother did it suck.  "Running" on the elliptical is one thing, but with today, I was made keenly aware of how much more energy it takes to jog my 256 lb fat self on actual roads.

It wasn't so much the energy expenditure, as it was the motion that really upped the suck factor.  Our family went to Disney World a few years ago.  My son was about 6 or 7 years old, and was a bit tentative about the "scarier" rides.  We had gotten a book that previewed all of the rides, and there was a dinosaur "safari" type ride that he had deemed not too scary, and really wanted to go on.  Well, after we all belted in and set off, I could tell it was going to take a turn for the worse for him.  He hated it, and it took quite a bit of let's say, "creative" convincing later on the trip to give "Space Mountain" and "Tower of Terror" a shot (but that's a story for another post).

The funny thing about the dinosaur ride that freaked him out was that it wasn't the Jurassic Park-esque point in the ride where the T-Rex gets right in your face and roars at you because he thinks you ate the goat that he had been saving for himself,

but the bumpy, jarring motion that you felt the entire ride.  This is what running felt like - that constant bumpy jarring motion.

Often times, this is the point in the post where the author writes "...but I didn't hate it, I'm becoming a runner!"

Yeah, no, put me down for "I still fucking hate it".  But we're going to see this thing through until the color run and see where that takes us.

The seating dilemma...

In one of my earlier posts, I wrote about the hate-hate relationship I have with restaurant booths.  Now, by no means have I tamed that dragon.  However, with a 4 lb loss this week, along with another 1/2" off my waist (which brings the running total to 45 lbs and 6.5 inches lost), this has made a noticeable impact on how I fit in a restaurant booth.  Of the few booths I've recently attempted to slide into (while thinking "pleasefitpleasefitpleasefit"), I've gotten in with relative ease.  Not only do I not hurt while sitting there because the table isn't pushing into my diaphragm, but there is actually (a little) space between the table and my stomach.

Restaurants can still be a bitch, even without a booth.  If we are at a table, I still usually have my chair pushed back way too far from the table so I feel I have enough room, which leads to waitstaff and customers bumping into you as they try to walk behind you to navigate through the tables.  And if someone is seated directly behind me, our chairs often bump into each other when one of us decides to get up from the table.  I always try to make sure I get a seat with my back facing a wall or a non-traffic area, a corner is the best.  Then again, no one puts baby in the corner (sorry - that was uncalled for).

Ugh...I can't fucking wait for this seating dilemma thing to start working out, though.  In nearly every public seating situation I can think of in recent memory, be it a movie theater,

baseball game,

airplane,

pretty much you name it - anything, I've got basically one move that allows me to not make the person next to me miserable and encroach on their space.  And that is to sit perfectly still with my arms crossed in front of my chest until the really really fun time we are all having is over.

I think it mostly has to do with (other than the obvious fact that I'm too fat) what I'm going to call "Tyrannosaurus Rex Tiny Arm Syndrome", or TRTAS (pronounced tert-ass).

Relative to my overall girth, my arms are fairly short, couple this with the fact that I basically have no lap, means I've got nowhere to put them unless I'm in a chair with nice big (non-shared) armrests, so all I can do is fold them in front of myself.

Anyway, it'll be nice to someday sit comfortably in seating designed for the average sized person.

Between worlds...

I think I'm mostly a positive person.  Losing weight and getting fit dominates quite a bit of my thought process lately, and through all of it, I notice my mind often goes to positive thoughts like "I'm feeling so healthy lately/My progress is really starting to show/I'll be able to fit into those pants/shirts/etc... before I know it", rather than "I wish I could eat that/This is going to take forever/I'm a fat tub of shit".

I do most of the grocery shopping for the family, and as I was loading the bags into the trunk a while back, I had a gallon of milk in my hand.  I thought to myself "I've lost this weight."  We go through about 4 gallons a week, and as I put each gallon in the trunk, I thought "I've lost this too!"  I actually snapped a picture of all 4 gallons since I was kind of amazed at how much it looked like all together:

 In fact, this was about 2 weeks ago, and with this week's loss of another 4 lbs, I'm up to 5 gallons lost.

So for the past couple of weeks, my mind has often gone to that image of those gallons of milk along with the thought of "Wow, most of that was fat on your body that you're not carrying around anymore, and you're still going strong!"

However, I find that while my mind most often lives in the world of the positive, every now and then something will send it right to negative land.

I caught an image of myself from an unexpected angle in a full-length mirror the other day.  And I'd just like to say, go fuck yourself full-length mirror.  As a matter of fact, all full-length mirrors - go fuck your collective selves.

Some people talk about an NSV happening when they catch a look of themselves in a mirror, and for a second, they don't recognize the reflection as their own since they look so different after losing so much weight.  Well, that's basically happened with me, but I didn't recognize myself as the still tragically fat guy from that angle in the mirror.

And just to make things extra-fun, I got another look at myself in a different full-length mirror, from an entirely different angle later that same day.  This time I actually recognized it was me, and thought "Ah yes - we look like complete shit from that angle as well."  Quite a kick to the berries.

So for the last few days, this has been the image that's been tattooed on my brain.  However, I've noticed that I'm already starting my journey back to Positiveville.  With golf season (hopefully) right around the corner, I was taking inventory of what shirts I had available to wear.  A bunch of them that didn't come close to fitting last season, and that I didn't think I'd be able to fit into until mid-summer, fit already.  Furthermore, my "goto" XXXL's went into the donation pile because they were comically large when I tried them on.

So, slowly but surely last week's fat guy in the mirror is morphing into this week's trimmer guy who is fitting into clothes that he had no hopes of wearing 3 months ago (at least in my mind's eye).

Weigh-in day pressure...

Since I started this thing back in January, I've been losing weight and inches at a pretty good pace.  Generally about 2 or 3 pounds per week, and 1/2" or so off my waist.  Indeed, this week I'm down another 2 lbs and also lost an inch around my waist.

However, up until about a month ago, I would consistently feel quite a bit of pressure when it came to "weigh-in day".  I was weighing in once a week - always on Saturday morning.  I found that I became increasingly obsessed during the week thinking about what number would show up on the scale come Saturday.  I even started doing crazy shit like eating a very small meal the night before (or sometimes even skipping dinner), and hardly drinking any water on Friday night, since I knew I would be stepping on that scale the next morning.

I think this mindset stems from some of the unhealthy, ridiculous shit we would do trying to cut weight on my high school wrestling team.  Coming off football season, I would weigh between 160 and 165, and would cut down to the 145 lb weight class for wrestling season.  Practices were brutal, and I'm sure we would burn a ton of calories, but cutting down to 145 was fairly tough, especially for those first couple of matches.

So when it got to a day or 2 before a match, here's a partial list of bat-shit crazy things we would regularly do:

• Eat next to nothing for a day if you knew you were going to be close to not making weight
• Drink next to nothing 12 hrs prior to your weigh-in if you knew it was going to be close
• Wear plastic sweats while running/jumping rope/or just sitting in a hot room trying to drop that last bit of water weight before weigh-in if you knew it was going to be close
• Continuing our dehydration theme (here's my favorite), carrying a can around with you and constantly spitting into it in an attempt to further lose water weight (I'm beginning to think this one may have had a negative impact on my social life)
• Having a huge cache of food and liquid to binge on after you made weight, because you had about an hour until your match actually started

Doesn't that sound like the perfect recipe for a lifetime of unhealthy eating and fucking up your metabolism?  Maybe even throw in an eating disorder, too.  Actually some guys would occasionally practice "binge and purge", but I never went there.

I think this past nuttiness definitely contributes to the increasing pressure I would feel before weigh in, so I decided to eliminate "weigh-in day" altogether (sort of).  Now, every day is weigh-in day.  I weigh myself first thing in the morning, and enter that number in my iPod using an app called "Weight Diary".  I considered going the other direction, weighing myself only once a month or so, but I think that would have just increased the pressure I was feeling with weekly weigh-ins.

Here's the graph of last month's daily weigh-ins from the app:

It feels like a huge weight has been lifted.  I now feel no pressure at all while thinking about the scale.  From the graph, I see that there are daily ups and downs, but the overall downward trend is very good.  Of course, I can rationally say I knew this was happening, but I guess it just helps to see it, too.