March 14th, 2012: I continue in a positive direction with my journey today – after the stagnation yesterday. Another pound loss, another battle won. 294.
I went to the farm and ranch store yesterday to buy some baby chickens. When I was there I saw Levi’s for sale for 19.99. With my one pair of jeans crotch-ripped and my two others so loose they’re like gunny sacks, I decided to buy a couple of pairs of the jeans. A tag on the jeans read “irregular”. Oh well, who knows what that means. Well, what that means is for 19.99, settling if you will, you get jeans with 2 left legs, or jeans with one leg longer than the other, or jeans with 2 belt loops missing – which is the pair I happen to be wearing today. Thankfully, I know that you mustn’t wear suspenders and a belt if you want to be trusted, otherwise I would have to wear suspenders with my belt, because my belt is partially on my pants and partially on my gut. Do not settle.
In my constant search for the meaning of things in life, even in relatively trivial occurrences, I’ve decided to take the irregular jeans incident as motivation to not settle when it comes to weight loss. I’ll admit that more than once these last couple days I’ve said to to myself, “hey, I’ve lost 50+lbs., that’s good enough”. Well, it’s not good enough. That would totally be settling, and I will not settle. If I were in weight-loss college, I’d still be a sophomore. I’d be too fat to graduate. Unlike with the cheap jeans, I will pay full price to get what I want when it comes to weight loss. Ask me if I’m going to continue? You are goddamn right I am.
March 14th, 2020: I continue today with my swim story, and eventually will attempt to illustrate the parallels with my weight-loss story.
Swimming is swimming, right? No, it is not. Swimming in a pool vs. swimming in open water are two vastly different animals, if you take the obvious structural differences and observe them from an altered mental perspective. First, there are no sides of the pool or marked shallow ends to aim for and hold onto should you realize you’re beginning to run out of gas. Second, there is no lifeguard to save you should you run of out gas. Third, there is only one long, unmarked stretch to swim, and when you pass a certain point-of-no-return, you suddenly realize you are very alone.
It was cold for a “spring” day. Couldn’t have been much past the 60’s, but having met the whole weight-loss challenge at that point, I felt I was a truly all-weather sonofabitch, as I’ve stated before; and this meant there was nothing so trivial as temperature, with a steady southwest wind, to make me change my mind. This was the day I was going to Rigby Lake, and I was going to swim solo all the way across it in preparation for a triathlon I had entered, which was going to take place two months hence.
The actual swim distance was another couple-hundred yards longer than just the leg across the lake, but the leg across the lake was going to be the most daunting. I brought my mom and my son and my confidence of knowing that I was able, at this point, to swim much further than this distance, in laps, in the swimming pool. I had no idea about wet-suits, I just had my regular swim trunks. I dropped off my cheering squad on one side of the lake and drove around to the other and parked my truck.
I drank some Gatorade, took off my shirt and shoes, tip-toed down to the shoreline, and stepped into the lake. Damn it was cold. Catch your breath cold. The wind made the water a little choppy. There was no sense delaying it. Fuck it, here we go. I took one last look at my destination across the lake, rolled forward and in, and just started crawling…
To be continued…
