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My Story begins here 3.2.08
My story begins in the fall of 2006, Mid-October to be exact. One month after my 40th birthday. I was a big boy back then. Out of shape, standing 6 feet, 250 lbs. I had high blood pressure and a heart condition known as 'A-fib', for which I was on medication to help control. I also had sleep apnea amongst other things. To say the least I was in bad shape and was not taking my health too seriously. So on this particular Tuesday morning I found myself sitting in my cardiologist's office for a scheduled visit. When I got call in from the waiting room the assistant has me take off my shirt and runs the normal battery of tests and then prepares the results for the doctor before leaving the room. After a short wait, my doctor comes in and goes over the results. He looks at me and pauses. I knew the news was not going to be good as he seemed to be pausing to prepare in his mind the best way to say what he needed to say to me. It seems my blood pressure even with the meds was still creeping up, and the A-fib was getting more prominent or pronounced. The course of action was to change to heavier / stronger medications. Along with these meds would come side more serious potentially life altering side effects. This disturbed me quite a bit and having just recently lost a friend who was only a few years older than me I became more concerned and pushed for an alternative or a compromise if you will. I think I was almost willing to accept responsibility on my part for years of abuse on my body. Well the doctor came back with words that I will never forget and they forever impacted my way of thinking from that day forward. He said "You cannot change or reverse the damage that you have done in the past, it is already done, but, you can make a difference for the future and be around to watch your kids grow up". As simple as that sounds it really had a profound impact on me. I pictured my children and realized my mortality for a moment. Then sprung back to reality. There was a way out of this mess? What can I do? Diet, excercise, and use the c-pap machine for the sleep apnea. The doctor cautioned that I really need to do cardio excercise each day to strengthen the cardio vascular system. It needed to be done for 30 minutes per session, not 15, not 20, nor 26, as medical studies had proven that the heart needs a solid 30 minutes of elevated workout per day or session to be effective. This coupled with a leaner diet should help me drop from obesity and into a healthier body. Okay, I agreed to this and he agreed to not change my meds for the time being, but to see how I was progressing in 2 months. If there was little to no change then I would have to go on the stronger medications.
Immediately, I came up with a plan to drop weight while the '30 minutes of cardio' reverberated in my head. Geez, that seemed like such a long time to me. Would I really be able to do this? I am not really into fitness as my body would attest to. I was obviously too heavy at 250 lbs to run (actually running did not even cross my mind at this point) so I started by getting out for a brisk walk daily for 30 minutes. As my low fat diet of Special K, Turkey sandwiches and chicken at dinner took hold, the pounds started to drop. Once I had lost about 25 lbs I began to shift from walking 30 minutes to riding a bike for 30 minutes. Eventually I mixed in hills and tinkered with the gears to provide more and more challenging workouts. Shortly there after I began to run. This for me was almost as historic as caveman's invention of the wheel or fire for that matter. Like Forrest Gump, I had no idea where these feet were going to take me but I just started to run and run and run! In the beginning it was a mile or as I remember going out with my son for a 1.8 mile loop that we mapped out. From about a quarter mile through most of the run I would be very winded and slow but after a week or two it became routine for me. Each night I would come home, kiss my wife and kids and then quickly change into my running attire and out the door I went. When I started running I was still a big boy with a gut and was not fast at all. I think I was recording my first runs in the high 12's per mile. Even that 1.8 mile work out was an incredible feat for me. Soon that 1.8 mile course was not enough. I added to it and 3 miles became 5 miles and 5 miles became 6 miles and so on. It was not until I had been running for several months that I made the jump from 3 to 5 miles. When I started out the runs were always at night. For me this increased the safety concern because traffic was heavier and there were the occasional crazies aloof. Even a beep or a person yelling out of the car window or throwing something would through me off of my pace. As the weather got warmer and the spring of 2007 rolled in, I switched to running in the morning and never looked back from there.
My revisit to the cardiologist in December of 2006 looked promising. At that point I had shed somewhere around 25 lbs. I bought a home blood pressure kit. My blood pressure was down some and I was under standing orders to continue monitoring and keeping a chart of the bp numbers daily. The good news was that I was headed in the right direction and did not need to go to stronger meds. Here is a 40 year old guy that was seriously putting no priority on his health, living large and enjoying it, then all of a sudden being totally thrust into a completely different direction. Although there were warnings and threats along the way and it was no surprise that I was going nowhere healthwise but down. Nothing really prompted me to act until my October visit. Fitness, was never a priority to me or anything that I gave much thought to. If I did back then it menatally would have tired me out. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed athletics like baseball, softball and occasionally shooting hoops but as far as the neighborhood was concerned I lived on the drinking side of the street and was a card carrying member. My neighbors know exactly what I mean by this and I think they miss me these days.
As the winter progressed I was putting in stretches of sometimes 3 weeks without taking a break from running. Occasionally I would go indoors to run on the treadmill but only if it were icy outside or below zero. Fortunately, we had a very mild winter by New England standards. For some reason the treadmill for me was too boring and too easy to stop. I liked to be out on the road and run as far as I could away from home knowing that I was going to have to equal that distance to get back. The weight continued to drop and as it did my mile times got faster and my mileage increased. By New Year's 2007 I was down to 209 lbs. Friends were starting to think I was sick and pleading with me to stop losing weight. I knew that my body would know where to stop losing weight and balance. I just was not there yet. I never starved myself or took anything unnatural. I ate low fat natural products and fruit when hungry and I ran. In February 2007 I did my first set of 10 and 12 mile runs. Earlier in the month I was offered an entry into the 111th Boston Marathon, but this was all too new to me and so I politely declined (of course I also had no idea how hard these were to come by). I really never thought of running a marathon until maybe June of last year. My goal was just to get healthy and lose weight. In late May - early June I set my sites on Baltimore and began to train with a new goal in mind. Running a marathon. I had already experience the rush of a road race and actually enjoyed the experience even though I am not a crowd person, I was able to focus well and zone in on my running.
...to be continued.