The Need For Goals

On Tuesday I was watching the latest episode of Extreme Weight Loss in which a woman named Brandi was the subject of the week. As part of her weight loss journey she was enrolled in a Half-Ironman Triathlon. Despite still being over 100 pounds overweight when she did the race, she finished it just seconds under the required time.

Then she all but quit for the next phase of the weight loss cycle.

I've seen this before. Hell, I've experienced this before. When you bust your ass to meet a fitness goal, only to quit after you meet it because you don't know where to go from there. I saw it plenty of times when I was a karate instructor (many, many years ago). People would get their black belt and then just quit a few months later because they don't know what they're supposed to do next. They trained for years to achieve their goal, then they get it and don't make a new one.

It's for this reason that you need to constantly have a goal in mind when you go on your fitness journey. It's why I'll need to keep having them for the rest of my life.

After the half-marathon is done, I'll have completed what was just a few months ago a seemingly unattainable goal. I keep imagining the sense of pride I'm going to have when I complete the 13.1 mile run on October 19th. But after that I'll need a new goal. And while what I call "Phase 2" was simply to get good at MMA, I need something more tangible to shoot for.

And I figure if a woman who is 100 pounds overweight can push herself through a Half-Ironman, I can too. So next year I'll be doing my first one next August in Benton Harbor. I'm going to need to find a gym with a swimming pool to do this. I think there's one in White Lake.

The year after that I hope to do Tough Mudder. That will depend on my upper body strength. I've never been able to do a single chin up in my life, and that course has a lot of climbing. But I have two years to get there.

I've been struggling with my eating lately. Now that my stomach is able to handle small meals it's been getting too easy to fall back into old habits. The other day I ordered a meat lovers pizza. I've been eating candy as well. I need to stop this.

This is my body going back to food addiction to replace my alcohol addiction. Now that I've stayed off the sauce (for 13 days now), my body wants to find another way to get a buzz. And now my stomach has expanded to the point where I can't eat whatever I want and still lose weight anymore. I have to put in work to keep losing it. So this is something that has to get dealt with asap.

I'd like to say that staying sober is easy. It's not. It's fucking hard. Today I was in the drug store and I saw a shelf of liquor and I just stopped and stared at it. I just stood there and kept looking at it. It was crazy hard to walk away. It was like running into the girl in high school that you know had a crush on you but you never had the guts to ask out. I don't know how else to describe it.

I work nights now, and in Michigan you're not allowed to buy alcohol from 2 a.m.-7 a.m. On my days off I find myself waiting until 2 a.m. to come around, just so I know that I've made it to the next day without drinking. I used to dread 2 a.m. Now I welcome it.

As far as my workouts go, they're hard. But they're hard because I'm doing so much more than when I started. They've gotten hard (and I've gotten stronger) to the point where I have days where I have to run three miles and that's the easy day. Three miles is now an easy run to me. Back in February I couldn't even run that far. Twice a week I run five miles and then lift weights for an hour. On Saturday I'm going to run seven miles for the first time in my life. And those are just the hard days. My easy days were once the stuff of my nightmares. But just like the three mile run, one day, my hardest days are going to become my easy days. The workouts keep getting harder. I keep getting stronger. I am a warrior.

Enjoy this little slice of awesome: