On holiday"
~Green Day~
So after ten grueling weeks of diet and exercise, the first leg of my journey is complete.
It started on a sunny day back in mid-April, when a heavily-out-of-shape redhead meandered into a barely-used fitness center and started pumping the iron. In addition, I started on an extremely strict diet of vegetarian meals and water for the first few weeks in an attempt to jump start my weight loss. And for the first few weeks, I stuck to it hard-core. Through the first five weeks, I lost 28.7 lbs., an average of 5.74 lbs. per week. I was on a roll. Two more solid weeks saw another 4.2 lbs come off the frame, at which point I accepted the fact that the long-feared plateau had finally been reached.
Along the way, I passed tests at almost every interval, from eating out to avoiding comfort food to not snacking between meals and so on. In fact, I started to get very comfortable, and maybe even a little greedy. This became glaringly apparent in Week 8, when I gained back 5.7 lbs., bringing my total back to 27.2 lbs. (still not bad at 3.4 lbs. per week). But if I learned one thing during this journey, it's that I don't like having my hard work undone by anything...especially my own lethargy.
In Week 9, I got back on the horse a little bit, but not by much...or so I thought. My workout routine really wasn't much different then in weeks past. Maybe I was curtailing the size of my meals, but really, that was about it. My weight loss for Week 9 was an astounding 11.9 lbs., bringing my total back to 39.1 lbs. (4.34 lbs. per week). I had not taken any especially long trips to the bathroom, and I still can't explain why I lost 4% of my starting weight in one week.
So after 9 weeks, that's where we stand: 39.1 lbs. lighter...1 weigh-in from the future...7 days off from the gym...1 "Hallelujah".
*****
After my Week 9 weigh-out (I like this better than weigh-in, because at least I feel better saying something like, "All my fat's on it's Weigh Out" (c) Chris Gordon), I was ecstatic, and also a bit freakishly obsessed with trying to lose more weight. In fact, I believe the first words out of my mouth were, "Eleven-point-nine pounds? How much do you think I can lose next week?"
Which is where the worry comes in from my family and friends. See, there are certain folk in my life who believe that I am losing the weight too fast, and that this could be detrimental to my health, as well as extremely gross when you factor in how much extra skin I will eventually have.
Well, not quite that bad.
Regardless, I've been told several times that losing too much weight too fast can be bad for you. I'm not trying to be naive, but I just don't see it. Somebody please tell me before I get on the treadmill again and hurt myself.
So when I saw the 11.9 flash on the screen, I was obsessed with getting as close to that number as I could again. And since Week 10 was my last week before a mini-vacation from the gym, I decided to go back to basics: up the weights at the gym, up the speed of the treadmill, go easy on the food, and get back to feeling like I did that first week when I was miserably out of shape and wondering why the hell I even got into this. No music, no television, practically no human contact: just shut up and lose the weight.
And I can say for a fact that I wanted it bad. How bad? Two things happened this week that proved the ultimate test.
1) I fell on the treadmill. I alluded to this earlier this week, but here's the full blow-by-blow. When I run on the treadmill, I tend to drift from side-to-side once in a while. Usually I see this happening and correct myself. For whatever reason, this time I did not. My right foot was then half on the belt and half off the track, and since all my weight was on my right foot for the moment, the belt whipped my foot out from under me. That shot me 90 degrees to my left, where for an awkward second or two I tried to remain upright. When that failed, the belt - whipping under me at exactly 7.0 miles per hour, flung me into the air, where I proceeded to crash hard on my left side. But it doesn't end there, oh no! The belt shot me off into the wall, and since there wasn't a lot of space between the treadmill and the wall, I had to curl into the fetal position while the belt tried to ground about four layers of skin off my back. It hurt, like, a lot. I yelled and swore, shutting off the treadmill for a moment and tried to walk it off. My left arm and leg hurt a lot, but not as much as the treadmill, as I had landed so hard there was now a giant crack near the back of it. Regardless, I had less than a quarter-mile left to run, so I got back up, turned the treadmill on, and ran it out. Old Chris would have never done that. He would have drowned his sorrows in NeoSporin and Tostitos.
2) On Friday, my last official workout, I came down with a pretty bad stomach cramp that afflicted me so badly throughout the day that I briefly considered not going to the gym at all. I had been to the bathroom several times that day, and when I started stretching for the gym, sweating out another 1,000 calories wasn't exactly something I was looking forward to. But I sucked it up and went through with the whole workout, even running out the mile at the end. That's not to say that (children and civilized people, cover your eyes) I didn't have a life-altering fart in the middle of a set of incline push-ups that I could feel coming down the hatch 20 seconds before blast-off. It required so much energy I had to stop breathing for a second to fully appreciate the impact this particular form of flatulence was about to have. That, and I was afraid I would contract prostate cancer if I breathed in the fumes.
So you see, on the exercise end of it, I really wanted a big weight loss bad this week. Too bad my diet didn't get the same treatment. On Saturday, I journeyed to Northern Maine to DJ a wedding, stopping at the one and only Mickey-D's on the way up, where I devoured a Big N' Tasty, fries, and a Diet Coke in about 14 seconds. On the 3-hour drive home, I stopped twice: once at Tim Horton's where I ordered an XL coffee with cream and sugar and the biggest turkey bacon club sandwich I had ever laid eyes upon, and once at Irving's, where I downed a liter of Mountain Dew and a bag of Chex Mix (I do not receive compensation from these companies, not even the fine folks at Taco Bell, home of the $1.99 Chalupa!)
So that wasn't such a good thing. But wait....there's more!
*****
To celebrate 10 weeks of [constant] exercising and [mostly] dieting, I determined that I would have to commemorate this first leg by doing something so far out of my comfort zone that I would be proud of it for years to come. I had already hurdled one mountain by running the 3.5-mile Back Bay, so I would have to go bigger this time. And when you look at the Portland Trail System, there's only one trail that's longer than the Back Bay. In fact, "dwarfs" might be a better word.
I decided that I was going to run the Harborwalk Trail. There's no point in trying to describe it, so here's the map instead
Just know that the starting point is East End Beach (at the top) and the end point is Bug Light Park (to the right). Total length: just about 6 miles i.e. THE LONGEST DISTANCE TRAVERSED BY ONE CHRISTOPHER GORDON. But could I do it? I thought I could anyways. I ran a mile almost every day for over two months, and as long as I didn't get too ahead of myself, I though I would have a pretty good chance of completing it.
I started shortly after 6pm on Sunday...
...and finished my non-stop run at 7:15. Unbelievable. Touching Bug Light was the highlight of my ten weeks thus far, and on top of that it was a beautiful day, I hadn't collapsed, I had lost tons of weight...do I need to explain how big my smile was? Just to prove I was there, here's a picture of Bug Light shortly after I touched it...
And for you true cynics out there, here's a picture of me in front of Bug Light, all sweaty and stuff
And for those who just like sexy things, here's another picture of me
And for those tired of me trumpeting my own virtues, here's a picture of Fat Me frowning
Everybody happy?
*****
So after running 6 miles, busting my ass for 10 weeks straight, and promising myself a week off for good behavior, I come to my tenth and final weigh-out, hoping beyond hope that all my hard work paid off just one more time. So how'd I do?
WEIGHT AFTER TEN WEEKS - MIDNIGHT, MONDAY, JUNE 21, 2010: 267.8 LBS. (+4.9 LBS.)
You know what? After 10 weeks, 85.5 miles ran, only one steak eaten, and a total of 34 pounds lost, I'm not even going to bitch this time. Just...grin and bear it.
LATE ADDITION: Two more developments that should give me a reason to keep hope alive...
1) My waist size dropped to a 36 - well, 38 comfortably. Had I bought the 36 shorts, the button would eventually have gone flying across the room like a champagne cork
2) I dropped a whole shirt size to an XL. No such luck with my enormous Irish head.
So now I'm on break for a week: break from the gym, break from the strict diet, break from taking three hours out of my day to prepare for the gym, work out at the gym, and unwind from the gym. C'est la vie! See you in a week!
How do I feel at this exact moment? On a scale of Olga Sherer to Gilbert Grape's mom, I'm a Big Baby Davis: tried hard for a long time, the weight kept coming off, and much like the 2010 Celtics, the final week didn't turn out exactly like I thought it would; also, like Big Baby, I screamed so loud after the Week 10 weigh-in that I scared the HIV out of Magic Johnson.
No comments:
Post a Comment