Stadiums

   I tried something new after work yesterday; instead of going for a bike ride I headed over to Florida Field and ran stadiums. If you’ve never done that before you may think that it’s no big deal, but it is. It is very hard! We were running up the section in the upper right area of this picture from the field level all the way to the top. I believe I counted 147 steps up. I went up and back down four times (that’s 588 steps by the way) and my legs were like rubber afterwards. I’m told that if I keep doing it I’ll be doing it 40 times by winter…..we’ll see.

Rain Day

 I skipped my usual mountain bike ride this morning due to our bipolar weather here in Florida today. Even though it's beautiful outside now, this morning it was not. It was pouring rain and according to the weather map it didn't appear to be going away anytime soon. Now I'm not entirely against riding in the rain, I just have a hard time starting a ride in the rain. So instead of going out in the mud I stayed in and worked out on this, which happens to be where my road bike seems to stay parked most of the time lately.

Time to Obsess

  Four short years ago I was in pretty bad shape, funny thing is I don't think that I even realized it. I was always exhausted, my body always ached even though other than standing the entire day, my job wasn't any more physical than my current job. In fact I rarely had a day where I felt good. I was working a lot of hours in a job that seemed to keep me in a constant state of stress. I was eating drive-thru crap everyday, sometimes mutiple times a day, and always the largest size available. Usally with an extra cheese burger or burrito from the value menu. It's only another 99 cents so why not?

  Who knows how heavy I actually got. I just know that one day I got on the scale and it said 250lbs. I couldn't believe it.  Something had to be done. I dusted off my old mountain bike and started riding some after work, my wife got me a gym membership and I somehow came up with the time to use it, nearly every day of the week. She also set me up with a nutrition expert to teach me about the food that I was eating. I had a meeting with this expert once a week to talk about what I had been eating and what type of exercises I had been doing. Oh yeah....and to weigh in on the dreaded scale. And I think it was because of these weekly meetings that I became almost obsessed with the food I was taking in and the amount of calories I was burning. It was amazing how much better I was feeling once I started to get back into shape. Not just physically, but mentally as well. I don't remember how long it took exactly, somewhere around six months, but I got rid of 58lbs. of extra mass that I was carrying around on my feet everyday. And I gained quite a bit of muscle while I was at it.

 192lbs. was my weight and I was able to keep it between that and 195 pretty much for 3 years. This year however seems to be slipping away from me though. I remember telling myself that I would never let myself get back over 200, and I've been there for at least the last 6 months. At one point recently I saw 212 come up on the scale. Must be time to obsess again.