An awesome journey

Over the past few months, I really stepped my weight loss up a notch. While I was never fat (6'3" and 225-230lbs in December), I was definitely getting a little chunky over the winter. If you are not careful, stress and inactivity will do that to you. As some of my stress was dissipating and I was able to get back into some routine of a training program, the weight started to come off.

I participated in a running study, which gave me an opportunity to see where my weight was during the end of March/beginning of April (212lbs). Basically, my training regime was helping me shed some weight, but my goal racing weight is in the 185-190lb ball park. I believe that I raced each of the last few years between 190-195lb. I am still a big guy, but I need to be lite to try to keep up with the mountain goats in some of the hillier races.

At the end of April, Kari found an app for our iPhones that would allow us to track our caloric intake and expense. Perfect! I immediately plugged in my goal weight of 185lbs and weight loss plan of 2lbs/week. I quickly learned how bad some foods are for you and how much I was theoretically burning on my workouts. I took things a little extreme and would typically underestimate how much working out I was doing and overestimate how much food I was eating. As a result, I am currently sitting at 181-182lbs (depending on the time of day) a mere 4 months later. I have not switched the program into maintenance mode just yet, because I would like to get it down to 180lbs prior to the Fall when my activity decreases. The goal would be to maintain that weight for the winter by recording calories in and out, so that I do not have to cut weight during the race season.

Probably the roughest part of the whole weight loss thing was dealing with off/recovery days. They were days that I typically did not do anything physically active. Unless I saved calories from hard workout days, I usually did not have a whole lot available to eat on my rest days. Oh well. It is almost over!

Ok, so the purpose of my post was to highlight a youtube video that my podcast informed me of. I subscribe to a few podcasts, one of which is the Best of Youtube podcast. Today's video was very good and fit my story a bit. Here was a guy who was in a lot worse shape than me who changed his life through action. While I have not been on this planet long, I have learned that if there is something that you want, you need to go for it. Success does not happen to those who sit idly by hoping for a change in circumstances. It comes to those who are actively pursuing it. One definition of success that I've heard and like quite a bit is: Success is where opportunity and preparedness meet. My question to you is simple. Are you preparing for success so that opportunity does not pass you by? Or are you just waiting to get all of your ducks in a row? (Hint: Ducks never get in a row without the help of a string)

Enjoy the video!

His blog is pretty good too