Reflection

I've had a lot of time recently to reflect on my journey thus far. When you run 20 miles, you've got a load of time to get lost in your thoughts. On Friday, my wife and I did our first of three 20 mile runs. During that run, I thought about how far I have come.

In high school, I remember doing Weight Watchers with my mom. Back then, they prescribed 20 minutes of physical activity a day. Yeah. 20 minutes. At the time, I thought it was outrageous. No way could I, at 300lbs, maintain 20 minutes of physical activity a day. And then, everyone started saying that you needed 30 minutes of physical activity a day. NO WAY can I do that! If 20 minutes wasn't hard enough, 30 was impossible.

I spent 6 hours doing cardio over the weekend. Four hours of running, two hours of cycling.

Obviously, I've come a long way.

Progress isn't something that comes easy. It takes a lot of hard work. I believe that's true in all aspects of life, but especially with fitness and weight loss (for me, anyway). When I started running a little over a year ago, I hated it. I learned to enjoy it to a point by setting my goals and working to improve my personal distance and time records.

Ultimately, I set a goal to run a half marathon, which I completed. It hurt worse than anything I'd ever experienced through exercise. My muscles were completely exhausted and my mind was struggling to keep my body going. When I finished, I broke down in tears. Partly from the pain, partly because I was so proud of what I'd done. That 13.1 mile run took me 2:26:33. It was a distance PR, but I'd left myself plenty of room for improvement on time. Right then, I didn't care about the time, I was just happy to have run the distance.

When my wife and I moved to the shore, I signed us up for another half marathon. This one, I was going to train better for. We ran through the winter and we set the goal of finishing under 2 hours. Again, we accomplished our goal. In Atlantic City, we ran 13.1 miles in 1:59:21, besting my previous half marathon time by over 26 minutes.

Next up, Marine Corps Marathon. We're most of the way through our training and things are going well. We had our best long run in a long time and covered more distance than I'd ever thought dreamed I could do. Until recently, 26.2 miles was outside the realm of possibility for me. I'm still a heavy guy, but damn if I didn't just run 20 miles on Friday night. I'm confident that once the weather cools off and the humidity dies down my speed will increase and the distances will be easier to cover. At this point, I feel ready to run a marathon and I'm excited about how far I've come.

So for any of you who think to yourself, "There's no way I can ever make any progress on this exercise stuff." Think about me and what I've done so far. I may still be overweight, but on October 28th, I'm going to run a marathon!