Good morning, campers! Here we are, in Week Thirty-Three, and it seems the wheels might be coming off a little bit for Big Skeezy. It’s been a fairly stagnant couple of week on the scale plus last week’s update certainly made it seem like he was all but done with this thing. How did this week go? Let’s break it down:
I’d like to start off this week by thanking everyone who showed their support after reading last week’s article. I never realized how many people, both near and far, are paying attention to this journey I’m on. The most common misconception was that I was quitting. Apparently it read as though I was fed up with the whole thing and that was going to be that. That couldn’t be less the case, as it was really just a way for me to ask you all for ideas on how to get past this plateau I’ve hit. It was also a way to see if it was getting as boring for you, the reader, as it was for me to be writing the same thing every week. Even so, the outpouring of support and ideas I got really hit me. It’s one thing to think you’ve got great family and friends but it’s quite another to see it in action. For all of you who reached out (and continue to do so) I thank you. For those of you who are just reading and didn’t come up with any ideas, thank you, too…even though that’s pretty damn lazy. I kid, I kid!
The ideas for how to shake it up were various. Here’s a quick list of some of the suggestions I got:
– Bikram Yoga (still on the table, but spending ninety minutes contorted in 130 degree heat doesn’t sound too good)
– Pre-Natal Yoga (this suggestion was mentioned to a pregnant girl I work with by a non-pregnant girl I work with. I may end up there yet.)
– Entering the Gladiator Rock n Run (www.gladiatorrocknrun.com- more on this later)
– Creating the First Annual Cosby Sweaters Big Skeezy Run of Some Kind (how many of you would show up for that? Real talk – Let’s get a headcount here.)
– Take more and new supplements (always good, though I still need suggestions)
– Enter a triathlon (also still possible but need more training and to find one nearby)
– The Doctor suggested a “body oriented opportunity” (which turned out to be a link to a nudist resort)
– Trail Runs in Griffith Park
– Zumba Classes
– The Insanity DVDs (which, by the way, are INSANE)
– Tae-Bo
– Enter a body building contest (yeah, I need about five more years of the BSC to be ready for that)
– Water Aerobics
– A Scarface amount of cocaine
Obviously,some of these are better ideas than others. What I decided to do was the Gladiator Rock n Run, to be held at the Rose Bowl on October 1st. For those of you who don’t know what it is, check out the link above. It was designed by Dan “Nitro” Clark, one of the original American Gladiators. It comes in 5 and 10K flavors. Not only are you running that distance, but you’re also having things thrown at you, sloshing through mud, waist-deep ice pools, climbing cargo nets, etc. People show up in costume, it’s a hell of a lot of fun and you’re handed a medal and a beer at the end of it. It sounded perfect and so I paid the entry fee and started getting ready for it.
The first step was the running, as I haven’t run to or from anything in a long time. My knees are also not that good, stemming from a lifetime of hurling myself into dangerous and sometimes ill-advised situations which resulted in my ripping them apart from time to time. I started small, doing a mile a day on the treadmill and then adjusted my strength training regimen, moving from my usual machines and such to the Hammer Strength devices, the bench press, and the pull-up bar. I hit this hard all week long.
Friday night was the beginning of what was supposed to be a quiet weekend, beginning with seeing “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” that night. We had a few drinks, nothing extraordinary, and saw the movie. By the way, that movie is awesome! After the movie we made our way to Manhattan Beach to meet up with a friend. What we didn’t know at the time was that this would be the decision that took us from “quiet weekend with a golf tournament on Sunday” to “we might as well have been in Vegas”.
We closed down the place we were at Friday night, woke up at the friend’s house on Saturday, made out way home, napped, went to the store, stocked up, hit the pool, started in again, I was in and out of sleep the rest of the day while awaking here and there to rejoin the festivities, and then finally cashed in relatively early Saturday night.
Sunday morning was our 2nd Annual Golf Invitational, which is basically just 8-10 of us getting together to play golf and act like hooligans. We had tee times at 8:45 and 8:52 and off we went. It was a lovely, cool morning – perfect for being on the links. The tournament began to get ugly around the turn:
Luckily, we escaped with no injury or damage to the course and made our way to Venice for the post-tournament fun. We spent the rest of the day having drinks and making new friends. The day, for me, ended around 9:30PM when I gave up and went home. Apparently those of us who were still awake weren’t awake for long after I left.
So Monday it was, as always, back to the routine and that brought me to what I knew damn well would be a bad Tuesday morning. I climbed onto the scale and discovered that I’d put on a pound, bringing me up to 284 and reducing the weight loss to 87 pounds. All in all I’m okay with that, as a lot of good came out of this last week. There was, however, one epiphany that crushed me just a tiny bit:
I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about the Gladiator Run, which I have been very excited for since it was suggested. Mid-sentence my eyes widened, my jaw dropped, I looked at her and said, “Oh, no.” What I realized in that instant was that I have a wedding to go to the same day as the Rock n Run. The Run is at the Rose Bowl and the wedding is in OC. It looks like I won’t be making the Run after all, which is heartbreaking but not as heartbreaking as missing the wedding. That being said, here’s your assignment for the week: find me something else to train for.
Go hard. See you next week.
