This Sucks

My abs are still injured, and I've gone five days without working out.

This sucks donkey dick.

You know when your phone is fully charged and it keeps warning you to take it off the charger, lest it get too much energy and ends up overloading?

That's me.

I am a ball of untapped energy. I want to run wind sprints. I want to pump iron. I want to do martial arts. I want to hang from the ceiling and do crunches like that guy in Deuce Bigalow.

Yeah, I want to do this.

But I can't, because I'm injured.

This is such bullshit.

My weight is also up to 252.

I Beat The Crim! Let The Final Countdown Begin!

I ran ten fucking miles today. And I hurt.

But before I discuss why I hurt, let's go to the photos!

This is me during my 5K, when I weighed 280+ pounds and thought that running 3.1 miles was a challenge (now, a 3 mile run would be what I'd call "rest day"):

Here's me at the 10K, when I weighed about 270:

And here's me at 250 pounds, just finishing the Crim:

I am svelte as fuck!

I even convinced my wife to do her first 5K, which she had to walk due to her being pregnant:

Say hi to the awesomest wife ever!

So why the pain from an itsy-bitsy 10 mile run? (And I say that non-ironically, I know people that have run marathons and triathlons who weren't hurting as bad as I am right now).

Remember that ab injury I mentioned a few weeks ago? It hasn't gone away, and here's why:

I finally got a doctor to check to see why my abs were still having consistent pain after three weeks. He said that it was simply muscle strain from overtraining (turns out that despite what CT Fletcher tells you, overtraining is not a myth). I asked him why I was still feeling it after three weeks despite not doing any weight training, and he said that my long-distance running wasn't doing my abs any favors. I told him I was running the Crim that weekend and he said to avoid any running until then. So I did, and went four days without doing any exercise at all.

So my abs felt fine when I started the run. I was crazy motivated to get started in the beginning. I carbo-loaded the night before and was hopped-up on pre-workout formula. I looked at the start line and didn't see a race. I saw a battlefield. This was war. I actually had Loaf's voice in my head screaming at the road "WE ARE GENERALS, YOU ARE THE ENEMY!"

I ran out the gate and started passing everyone, immediately realizing that I had seriously underestimated how fast I was going to run this race, so I started way in the back. I thought I would have a mile average of about 12 minutes. But for the first 3/4 of the race, my average was about 10:30.

Unfortunately in the middle of my seventh mile my abs decided to protest. It was like it was screaming at me "HEY, REMEMBER ME MOTHERFUCKER! THE ABS THAT CONSISTENTLY STAY INJURED BECAUSE YOU CAN'T STOP WORKING OUT FOR TWO GODDAMN SECONDS!?" So my average hit a downward trajectory of 11:11 minutes. I still completed the race at 1:51:48, well below my goal of two hours. But after the race, despite drinking large amounts of water, my body started experiencing heat cramps, which only exacerbated the injury. Just as I started considering hitting the first aid tent, my wife texted me and let me know that she was almost done with her race. So I soldiered on and afterward we hit up the Tropical Smoothie Cafe where I got a turkey sandwich and some liquified fruit and sugar into my system.

The ab strain still persists, though, and it's because of that that I'll be taking two weeks off of working out completely. It sucks, but it'll suck worse if I can't heal up. If I stay on the paleo diet (which I follow on days when I don't need to carbo-load for a long distance run or deal with passing out after the run), I should be okay. On Friday I weighed 250 pounds even. I'm sure I took out a couple of pounds on this run, which would mean that I'm less than 10 pounds away from my goal weight.

So anyway, bring on the half-marathon. It's the final countdown!

Kicked Ass, Then Got Sick

I did great on running this week, and on my diet. I got my weight down to 252 pounds by keeping on the paleo diet and by keeping up with my running.

The bad news is that I haven't been able to lift weights all week. What I thought was just fatigue up in Tawas City is worse. Every time I try to lift I feel an intense pain in my lower abdomen. I'll have to go to the doctor this week to get that squared away. I hope it's not a hernia and it's just strained muscle. Either way I hope this gets fixed quickly because my upper body muscles have shown a lot of atrophe.

I can still run, though, and I've been doing great at it. I ran five miles in under 50 minutes for the first time, and completed my 9-mile run on Saturday morning. I'm just one mile away from doing the Crim, which is in two weeks.

I made sure to prepare adequately for my nine-mile run so that I wouldn't nearly pass out like I had two weeks prior when I did eight miles. I drank plenty of water the day before, and ate pizza to carbo-load for the run (BTW-Carbo-loading for a long-distance run is the only acceptable time to eat pizza. Otherwise it's just empty calories).

On Saturday afternoon I started feeling sick. I'm blaming my wife for this one. She got sick a few days ago. We thought it was related to her pregnancy, as her symptoms were extreme fatigue, nausea, and vomiting. But I guess it was a real virus because I have the same thing. I've been sleeping all day and have avoided eating for most of the day. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow.

Paleo Pasta!

I've been experimenting with various healthy recipes for a while and found one that was awesome!



This is an easy version of paleo pasta, with celery being substituted for penne noodles. (Forgive the generic directions, I've never typed out a recipe before. But it's as easy as making spaghetti, so just use common sense with your measurements).

Ingredients:
1. Celery
2. Chicken breast
3. Spaghetti sauce (make your own recipe, or just use store-bought sauce. I used Kroger's three cheese blend).
4. (Optional) Shredded mozzarella cheese

Bake your chicken breast according to directions on the label. While the chicken is baking, cut your celery into 1 inch pieces. Place the celery into a pot and boil until very soft. Heat up your sauce in a separate pot.

After your chicken breast is cooked, chop it up into small pieces about 1/2 square inches. Combine all the items into a large pot and serve. If you'd like to add a little flavor, sprinkle with some shredded mozzarella cheese.

It tastes delicious, and it's a lot healthier than traditional pasta. I made enough to feed a homeless shelter so I've been eating it for the past few days now and have yet to be tired of it.

If you don't like celery, you will after this. Trust me.

Setbacks Are A Bitch

Well, this week wasn't that great. Not going to lie.

It always seems to be during my "recovery week" that everything goes to shit. I either get sick or something else happens.

My wife had a job interview up in Tawas City and we decided to take our camper up there for a mini-vacation, as it's cheaper than a hotel and we're still trying to break in our little "hotel on wheels". While we were up there I didn't eat very healthy, didn't take my supplements, and pretty much just drank Diet Pepsi the entire time I was up there.

I did go to the gym, but all I could do was my run. After I was too dizzy to do any weight-lifting, and my lower abs were extremely sore the entire week for some reason. I couldn't even do a single leg lift for a week.

And I also drank alcohol while I was camping. I had to go from a night-shift sleep schedule to a day-shift schedule, and I don't know any other way to do that without drinking. But more on that later.

When I got home from camping I found out that I went from weighing 254 pounds to 261.

I was only gone for three days, so I know that it's scientifically impossible for me to have gained that much weight in such a short amount of time without most of it being water weight. But still, it really sucks.

In the past, this little setback would have been enough to make me quit. But fuck that. I've come too far to quit. And I'm never going back to where I was. NEVER! So instead of quitting, I've decided to hit everything harder.

The first thing I did was go back to a strictly paleo diet. Breads, grains, any kind of complex carbohydrates are out of my diet plan. Strictly protein sources, fruits and vegetables are in my diet now. I had to take a couple of days off from the gym for my abs to recover (I'm still wondering why they got so sore in the first place), but now they have so I'm going to be beating the shit out of myself at the gym all this week. I have leg day in the morning. If my legs aren't a wad of cookie dough by the time I'm done, I will have failed.

The paleo diet is already showing results. I've already dropped back down to 259 pounds. When I start hitting the gym this week I anticipate being back at my previous weight by Saturday.

As for my drinking this week, it seems it was what I needed to stay off the sauce, if that makes any sense. The past few weeks before that I had been wanting a drink and when I finally did it, I didn't get the buzz that I once did. It didn't make me happy, just tired. Now I don't even want the stuff. It's gone from being something that made me feel good and was a substitute for my food addiction to just being a pointless waste of calories. Exercise has replaced junk food and alcohol as my feel good high.

I also found this awesome pic, courtesy of the guys at the Sports Motivation page on Facebook. I printed it out and put it on my bedroom door to serve as a reminder of why I do this. Enjoy!

I also found out that my last post had the highest traffic for my blog yet. Apparently posting half-naked pics of myself brings all the ladies to the yard. ;)