Well this will be the documentation of me “Getting Smaller”.
During my younger years I played high school football, ran track, I was on the swim team and I was a lifeguard. In short, I was in shape, somewhat. I never really paid attention to what I was eating during these years but was very active. After high school I joined the ARMY and for 6 years i did P.T. every morning. Push-up’s Sit-up’s, and a shit load of running. I was in great physical shape and was between 195 to 198 lbs. Once i got out of the ARMY I quit running and became a lazy fat ass, to this day I’m not sure how much a really weighed.
4 years after my release from the ARMY I decided to start running again. I had dealt with some personal changes in life at that point, quit smoking, and decided I needed to make an overall change. 1 year later (summer of 2001) I was running 5 to 9 miles a day and had dropped to 178lbs. I had thought about seriously training to run in the Boston Marathon in 2002 but a few weeks after Sept 11th I injured my knee and needed surgery. I recovered during the winter and felt like I really needed to get back into working out some how. I was to scared to start running again so I began lifting some dumbbells and other home gym type weights that my roommates and I had set up out back on the patio. This turned into a 2 ½ year obsession where I had decided that the home gym was not enough and I had purchased a 2 year membership at a local gym. Once I got back into shape to run again I began to do both on a daily basis. Because I had included the lifting program with the running I did not get as skinny as I had been when I was only running but I had leveled off at 196 lbs. I had also started taking supplements like creatine and L-glutamine and had really watched what I was eating. I still feel that I was in the best shape I’ve ever been in to this day. It was around this time that I had seen an ad for the Los Angeles Triathlon and the Malibu Triathlon. I wanted to do one of these but because it was so close to the race date I decided I’d train in all three sports for a while and do one the following year.
After my 2 year gym membership had run out I was working a great amount of hours in a new career, moved to a new location where a gym was not close by, and started a new relationship with my soon to be wife. With all that said, those are my excuses for letting myself go. Once again I have come to a point where I’m not happy with my physical shape (a.k.a. round) and I feel tired when I get up in the morning and its not just a sleepy tired, it’s an exhausting, “I know I shouldn’t feel this bad”, kind of tired.
So, I did something about it and I’m going to use this blog as a weekly update, progress report, journal, diary or whatever you want to call it. But I will be posting weekly pictures of my self and as the weeks go on I’ll post the week one photo side-by-side with the most recent photo to show the progress. I got a 3-year membership with 24 Hour Fitness and the renewal is only $50 a year per-year after the initial 3 years is up. This should make it easy for me to maintain my membership.
Now, the starting point:
It’s been 3 years since I’ve been in a gym or done any kind of routine physical activity. I’ve gone from a very lean 196lbs. to a very “fluffy” 240lbs. I don’t think I’ll be as militant as I was before about my diet but as long as I maintain the routine of going to the gym 2 to 4 days a week I’ll be happy. I plan to start out going every other day for the first month to get back into the routine of going and then I’ll see where I go from there. With my membership I also got 5 free personal training sessions but I think I’m going to wait on those until I get myself used to hitting the gym again.
I’ll be posting my first picture tomorrow.
Now it’s time to start getting smaller.
