32 Days - Dizzy Day At HomeIt was like any other day working out early until I returned home and suddenly felt the room spinning. My hands were shaking and I also felt an inner quake straight down the middle of my rib cage. It wasn't unlike the feeling I get when I go an entire day without eating for one reason or another and feel my blood sugar waning.
I had to lie down to keep from falling down as I wove about my hardwood floor as if it were the deck of a boat pitching in small swells. I called work and checked out for the day to work from home. I tried eating but my fingers continued to tremble as if I were 90. Dear God, let me make get through this and make it to 90.
I pinch the skin around my stomach and find that it's largely skin. The comfort of winter has melted away now - 25 pounds of it - to expose a rib cage once again as I've hit 180 from a previous 205. I count back to what I ate yesterday - a granola bar; a salad; a handful of brown rice wrapped in seaweed. Oddly, I'm not hungry, just shaky. However all of this seems worth it as I continue to knock off each day remaining until this nightmarish thing is behind me. I'm supposed to be getting something out of it but so far, it feels more like it's taking something out of me.
My brain is fuzzy all day long as I struggle through work calls. My email doesn't work to throw frustration on top of frustration. Somehow, 7 p.m. arrives and I decide to work out again for no good reason. One thing I've found about not feeling good is that no matter what you do, you still don't feel good so you may as well exercise rather than lie around.
Maybe that's what I've gotten out of all this - life isn't about feeling good all the time and that's when you just have to keep going...and going...around and around...until you're dizzy.
33 Days To Go: Average Joe - Iron Man???I'm not sure what quite possessed me to write down "complete an Iron Man" when I was 20 years old. Youthful exuberance perhaps, but certainly not sanity by any means. As such, I find myself 33 days from attempting one as July 24 and the Lake Placid Iron Man approaches like a bullet train without brakes.
I'm no longer 20 but 40 which not only makes me unyouthfully unexuberant, but also very, very average athletically speaking. Formerly six-pack abs now resemble years of lasagna leftovers, indestructible knees are now self-destructing knobs, and my back has gone through a double-discectomy surgery that lasted six and a half hours which left me 10 days with no feeling in my legs - something about a straw and a camel comes to my fuzzy mind as I recover from tonight's little workout of a 22 mile bike and a six-point-five mile run that lasted two hours thanks to an iPod cranked up full blast to overcome the lactic acid screams in my quads and calves.
Thank God for a purpose to spur me on or as I like to call it - a "spurpose." My friend Andreas who I met in 1987 was diagnosed with Leukemia not too long ago. Prognosis? Unknown. And so I've stepped up to the plate to knock a double into right center - cross another item off the now 20 year old "to do in life" list while making a difference in the world before something like Leukemia grabs me by the groin and rocks my world before I know what hit me.
I signed up for this thing last November thinking it would be easy and there was plenty of time to get ready. November now feels like yesterday and the "plenty of time" feels like tomorrow. Yet I'm at the plate swinging for some reason because life is a short game after all and if nothing else, I've never been totally happy sitting in the stands watching it go by if I have a shot at being in the action...glory days long gone or not.
I've learned along the way as I always do when undertaking these "to do list" items. I've learned you can melt 25 pounds of pasta off your body if you make yourself sick to your stomach with exercise. I've learned that people will come together and give to a great cause out of the blue which gives me renewed faith in the human spirit, especially when living in the hardness of New York's streets where it's every man, woman, child, taxi driver, and wanna-be-writer for themselves. I've learned that 16 miles isn't that far to run at midnight on a Friday while it's pouring on you if you keep in mind that you'll need to run 10.2 miles further after swimming 2.4 miles and cycling 112 miles beforehand in an actual race.
Most of all, I've learned that an Average Joe just might be able to pull it off and for one day be an Iron Man.
So keep my faith renewed in the human spirit because I'm still living in New York ;-)
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