Remission: Back On The Horse

I did pretty good losing weight. I went from 274 pounds down to 252. I was proud of myself, especially when I leveled off at 255 pounds. But then it happened, as it inevitably does. I slacked off on running. Then my birthday hit. Ten of those pounds came back. Sometimes, I get up to 267.

That’s a holiday thing. Always happens around Christmas. Part of it is I quit watching calories and slacked off on running. That’s gotta change. Yes, weight loss is the goal. I need to be under 240 pounds after Christmas, which means I need to stave off that holiday bloat as much as I can.

Which means I need to get back on a program. Right now, I’m not as worried as I might have been in the past. I’m still on only two medications. My sugar is fairly low, and my blood pressure is somewhat normal. But increased weight and lack of exercise can reverse the progress I’ve made so far. I don’t want that. I like being able to eat a candy bar without worrying about a diabetic coma. (I am not exaggerating.)

So this week, I need to restart running. It’s warm out now, and daylight goes past nine o’clock. So there are no excuses. I need to finish up my weekly trail ride this year. And I need to jump start the weight loss again.

I’ve decided, once I finish the bike trail this year, to do Insanity, one of the Beach Body workouts. I got the 30-day version. I’ve decided to spend June being insane, do some running in July, and, when classes end at the end of July, do Insanity one more time. So what’s that do for fall?

Well, with all that running, biking, and Insanity (which includes a diet plan), by fall, I should be ready to start training for a couple of 5K races. That will involve returning to my beloved Little Miami Trail for some distance running on weekends, visiting a park near Medishack for its par course, and possibly joining a running club. We’re also going to need a treadmill. There are three of us in this house, and we all have reasons to keep exercising. Nita and I wish they were AJ’s reasons, but AJ won’t even see 20 until next year. (I miss 20.)

The trick is not to have a program and stick with it. The trick is to always plan ahead.

That’s why I’m not swallowing half a dozen pills every morning and a few more every night. I want to keep it that way.

Remission: And Now I Start Running For Real

In January, I started a program to ramp up running. I started by power walking a 6-minute interval followed by one minute of running, repeating two more times. Gradually, the power walk was reduced to a minute while the running is up to nine minutes. I did have to stop halfway through the most recent one because my hips got too tight. It happens.

This week, I start running for real: Twenty minutes straight. Next week, 30 minutes. Then up to a nearby park and back, adding a lap around the park each week until the end of April. There will be a 90-day (or one-week, depending on how badly I hurt myself) break while I do P90X, but the goal here is to do a 3-5 mile run three times a week.

I haven’t run since 1984. Ronald Reagan was president. Gas was $1 a gallon. MTV still showed videos. The Internet was this super-secret computer thingie that Matthew Broderick hacked in War Games. I also turned 18 that year.

I turn 47 this year, and the body is not as resilient as it once was. For some reason, my threshold of pain is higher, probably life kicking someone around for an extra three decades, but there are more aches. I have the knees of my mother’s family, which tend to be stiff and get stiffer with age. I have a toe that may or may not have arthritis in it. I have a small toe on the other foot that I broke two years ago. It went completely numb after that.

But since starting this, I’ve plateaued at 14 pounds lighter than I was on New Year’s Day. Granted, diet has a lot to do with it, but the running has helped considerably. In the middle of this final phase of the ramp up, I’m also going to start biking the Little Miami Trail (more on that next week). What’s really helped, though, is that I now have decent running shoes. In high school, we was broke. My mom bought me the cheap shoes at K-Mart, and they had to be my walking around shoes and my running shoes and my gym shoes. No cleats or special New Balances for this boy. Oh, and they had to last until spring. Now? I can afford to go to Bob Ronker’s Running Spot and spend some decent money on a pair of shoes that can handle the punishment I dole out on my heels, support my weak arches, and generally let me forget about my feet while I’m out there sucking wind and wondering why I keep torturing my knees.

I do feel better since I started this. Hopefully by the end of the year, I can get a couple of 5K or 10K races in. My goal?

The Pig at 50!

Believe in it!

Running Update

My attempts to start running again after a 28-year recovery period has not gone as I expected. By now, I expected to be running 1-2 miles a day, maybe with a longer run on weekends.

Not happening.

Yet.

I’ve been working on intervals, starting with a six minute walk followed by a 1 minute run. Each week, I add a minute to the run and subtract a minute from the walk. I started this in April. Somewhere around Memorial Day, I got sidetracked after working up to my first four-minute run. I’d lost so much time I had to start over with one-minute intervals.

I’m back up to four minutes again. During the two- and three-minute intervals, I actually would get seriously winded and pray for the end of the run to come. My run is about 30 minutes, which means three intervals. After the end of the second run, I would dread the third.

Not the four-minute intervals. By the end of the first interval, I was falling into a rhythm. It would still be exhausting, but the recovery came faster, and my breathing would normalize during the run.

Of course, I’ve been cheating. During our recent heatwave, I didn’t run on days when the temperature topped 100 degrees. I suppose that’s not dedicated, but I am starting out again. I kind of wish I’d done something like this when I was fifteen and joining the cross country team. Completely clueless about running, but willing to learn, my first run ever was while wearing jeans and a pair of sneakers not designed for anything more than saving mom money when she bought me school clothes. I ran two miles in street clothes. My next run shocked my mother. After 15 years of refusing to wear shorts, I wore shorts.

Since I only run three times a week for now, I’m not to worried about dodging bad weather. Last week’s challenge was the late-day storms that pelted Cincinnati. In a few weeks, the challenge will be school. I start my bachelor’s degree at Wilmington College’s Cincinnati campuses. Unlike Cincinnati State, a technical college, Wilmington has no online classes. Once I adjust for that, I have to deal with the shortening days. I could run before work, but it’s dark then, too. And of course, cold weather. By then, I should be running about 2 miles a day, and the weather – unless it’s extremely cold or it’s a deep snow – is not going to be an excuse.

But I’m running again. And despite tightness in my hip the day after a run, it feels good.

Jim Winter Is…. The Running Man

I recently started running again. I hadn’t run seriously since my last cross country race in high school. That was in 1983, so I’ve had a 29-year recovery time. I hope it’s enough.

When I was in high school, I had running clothes provided to me by the school and by my parents. Although my shoes were lousy cheap K-Mart sneakers, they were, in fact, running shoes. From the summer of 1979, when I started to run for cross country until October of 1983, I had about a dozen or so classmates I could run with, even had to run with. For the first two years or so, I lived only half a block from the course of the Lodi Sweet Corn Festival’s Annual 5K run. So running that race was like a morning run for me. The result? At age 17, when I ran my last race, I was 6’1″, what I am now, and 152 pounds. I looked good, felt great, and had stamina to spare.

Fast forward to 2012. One of the advantages of marrying Marylin Monr- er, um Nita – is that we ate well. For a long time, we ate out a lot, and when we didn’t, we ate good at home.  We still do. But some time during the intervening years, I ballooned up to 305 pounds. I had, in about 2 decades, gained an entire high school senior. I’d managed to get back down into the 270′s at one point, but I didn’t stay there.

Thankfully, I never got above 300 again, though I came close. Last year, I decided to do something about it. I got myself back down to the mid-270′s through diet and exercise and have stayed there pretty much since then. But it’s not enough.

I’m a 45-year-old man with high blood pressure, type-II diabetes, and cholesterol. All of these can be traced back to a single cause: I’m still fat. So simply not snacking and playing with the workout band twice a week isn’t going to cut it. I have to do more. Time to get to running.

I’d love to tell you my first night, I went out and ran a mile, got winded, but never felt better in my life. And I could tell you that. You’d have no clue I was lying. Instead, I decided to work into it. I found an online program that eases you into running 30 minutes a day three times a week. Day 1 involved walking for six minutes, then jogging for one minute, then back to walking. Yes, that was very doable, and yes, I felt good. But…

The start of this program coincided with the discovery of a pair of New Balance cross trainers I found in my closet that had been buried for four years. So, instead of waltzing into Bob Ronker’s Running Spot in mid-April with $120 and spending an hour going over a running plan with my purchase, I suddenly had shoes and no excuse. I hopped online and found this particular running plan. I had the shoes. I even had a shorts I could wear. However, this is February in Ohio. I needed sweats. And the sweats I have no longer have elastic in the or a drawstring. I spent my first workout with the waistband of my sweats clenched in my fist and thanking God I wore boxers in case of a wardrobe malfunction.

I looked like a dork.

I don’t care how I look when I run. I’m not doing it to show off or gain anyone’s approval, except maybe my doctor’s. (And he’s paid to tell me “Thou art healthy” when only I’m doing something right.) I’m only interested in dropping my pulse rate, my weight, and my cholesterol. My blood sugar and blood pressure, not to mention my rather irritable liver (another downside to being a fat ass) will follow. Do it long enough, and I can climb into bed without having to strap on what I call “the Darth Vader mask” to keep from snoring.

I’m not hoping to accomplish anything more with this than to get healthier. My goal, when I turned 40 (shortly after I shed some of that 305 pounds that damn near killed me), was to be healthier at 50 than I was at 40. I think I’m on a good start. I’m flirting with dropping below 270 pounds for the first time in a decade. Back then, 270 was something of a magic number for me. At 270, my blood sugar plummeted to normal levels, I didn’t show signs of an angry liver, and my blood pressure was quite manageable. (It still is, but I want to lose the number of pills I’m taking.)

Down the road, however, I have two goals I want to reach: I want to run the annual Flying Pig Marathon, and I want to bike the entire length of the Little Miami Trail, starting in Yellow Springs and ending…

Well, by fifty, I can bike all the way down to Newport, Kentucky, and celebrate with dinner on the Levee. The trail will be finished by then.