March 11th, 2012: FINALLY!!! A week that started hard has ended superb! Ain’t that the way life just has to go sometimes. Another 3 lb. loss and I’m well below the glass floor of 300. Sitting today at 297. Make no mistake, I’m under no illusions that it’s not possible to bounce back up and over the 300 mark again, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. It’s not like I’m all kinds of stoked and jazzed, I mean, I’m still miles away from goal weight, but, I did break through a barrier.
I have to go get a blood draw today, preliminary stuff to get kind of like a yearly physical thing (this will be the first year since oh, about 10 years ago). But I’m turning over a new leaf here and there.
I have had blood draws quite a bit, they’re mandatory for my job, and of course, I do have a story about those, related to obesity.
As a fat dude, my arm veins didn’t show up too much, or at all, plus you know, being overweight affects your confidence in every part of your life, so I had essentially become a wimp all the way around. I had to get a blood test for a life insurance policy I wanted to buy. The vampire lady (phlebotomist) actually came to my house to do the blood test. We sat down on two chairs at the kitchen table, and as she was swabbing my arm with the alcohol prep pad I thought my (10 year old at the time) stepson might think it’d be cool to watch. “Sam come in here and watch her draw this blood”. He comes in and sits at the third chair at the table. She sticks the needle in (it actually never even hurts). She starts moving the needle around because she didn’t hit a vein or something in my fat arm. She goes, “Darn-it, I can’t get any blood”. I turn to Sam and say, “Darn-it, Sam, she can’t get any blood.” All of a sudden I felt hot and cold at the same time, and the next thing I know I was waking up on the tile on the kitchen floor and my wife and stepson and the vampire were all going “are you okay, are you okay?” And I had a washrag on my forehead. Hopefully today’s blood draw goes better.
When the needle goes in, I’ll be thinking about my Friday Future Daydream of entering a popular local sprint-length triathlon in July with the goal of just finishing (like a quarter-mile swim, 12-mile bike ride, 3-mile run). This could seriously emphasize the “dream” part of this, because though I know I can run the three miles, and maybe I could loaf through the bike ride, I swim about as good as a rock. Doing all three together would be a major accomplishment for me. I know that for sure I’ll do it someday, but between then and now, and as always, nobody gets to tell me what I can or can’t dream about.
March 11th, 2020: 18 months after I fired the first shot in this weight loss war; or took my first step on the journey (whichever way you want to look at it), I finished the Rigby Lake Triathlon. When I hit my goal weight, or even as I was on final approach to it, my confidence began to surge, and it encompassed everything I did in life. However, as I’ve been taught, it’s never a good thing to get too comfortable, which is why I took aim at completing this triathlon.
I had no illusions about doing well relative to other competitors, it was only me against me. The bike and run I had under control well before the day of the race, but after my first day of swimming laps in preparation for it, I had a serious wake-up call. I honestly can’t remember how many full laps at the pool I needed to do in order for me to hit a quarter-mile (the length of the swim leg of a sprint triathlon), but on day one of that training, I could only do 2 laps without stopping and holding on to the side of the pool.
There’s nothing to hold onto in the middle of Rigby Lake, so the challenge suddenly became quite daunting. It was daunting to the point of almost being too disappointing to continue because I had gotten in the pool with high hopes. I loved swimming as a kid, and it seems like I remember being kind of good at it. However, playing around and splashing, and bobbing up and down in the pool are, of course, fundamentally different than putting on goggles and doing the freestyle crawl back and forth for 30 minutes straight.
What do you do when you’ve talked shit to yourself about something, you’re sure you can handle it to the point of kicking ass, your confidence level is in the clouds, and then you step into the proverbial ring to kick some ass and after round 1 realize you’ve picked a fight with a real monster? For me, these challenges taught me one of the most important things I’ve ever been forced to internalize in concrete, and that is not to panic. These terrifying encounters could’ve been reduced to just another bridge to cross if I had made this mental electrical connection sooner. Whatever happens will happen, it’s the fear that truly sucks. And most of the time I learned that the fear is worse than the actual event.
The swim part of the triathlon represented the single most daunting physical challenge to that date. I was forced to break the length of one-quarter of a mile into a bunch of 25-meter pool lengths. It became another challenge synonymous to the whole weight-loss challenge. It became something that just wasn’t going to happen overnight. It was disappointing to say the least because I initially thought the swim would difficult, but not this fuckin difficult.
To be continued…
