It was a beautiful Saturday morning and my wife and I were going to be heading to San Francisco with her aunt and uncle to enjoy the sights and sounds of the city.
And, unbeknownst to me, a trek across the Golden Gate Bridge and back.
Now when you’re fat, going to enjoy touristy locations is a tricky proposition. You’re at the mercy of huge crowds so it’s always best if you do your homework first because the uninitiated can end up walking virtually straight up some of San Francisco’s hills while scarf-clad hipsters practically run up next to you.
It hurts the soul to get beat by a hipster. And it hurts the hips to climb up Nob Hill.
Know your surroundings.
It was a journey and it was a challenge, but by the end of the day, I held my head up high knowing that I had just walked – according to my trusty FitBit – six miles and I didn’t die.
“You act like you weren’t at one time an athlete,” quipped a friend in the office.
True. And I needed to get back to that place.
A few weeks ago I wrote a column about all of the lifestyle changes that I’ve been making since that fateful Golden Gate Bridge journey – many at the urging of my loving and encouraging wife Amber – and how they’ve sent me down a path that I’m hoping will lead back to the days when I didn’t get winded tying my own shoes.
When I didn’t have to worry about whether the group I was with were sitting at a table or in a booth. Or worry whether my car was going to get stolen because my body can’t take climbing into a 155-degree box without immediately flooding my clothes with sweat – requiring me to leave it running in the driveway.
It’s embarrassing. It’s not me. It’s who I’ve become thanks to a myriad of factors.
Now it’s up to me and my good friend the scale – who I was too afraid to mention the last time I wrote one of these – to keep that accountability train chugging along.
Some of the lifestyle changes are easy. A quarter cup of almonds with some dried blueberries is an amazing snack and it’s incredibly filling. I just learned that you can cook broccoli in the microwave and it’s actually quite good. And there are dressings other than ranch and they’re actually good.
Others aren’t quite that simple.
Trainer Doug Williams at Pure Form Personal Fitness Training – along with my good friend Lee Dahl – are brutal when it comes to the short-burst, high-intensity metabolic resistance training program that I’ve been committed to for the last six-weeks.
The results have been there.
At least twice on the same belt I’ve had to cut in new holes. Pants are fitting much looser. Shirts that at one time were snug are starting to become loose – one to the point that it’s comically large.
My muscle mass has increased, as has my bone density, and some of the little things that used to plague me on a daily basis like lower back pain seems to be completely gone.
Oh – and getting up off of couch can be done in a fluid motion now. No longer do I have to rock back and forth to generate the momentum.
I told my wife that there was no way I would work out at that place after we both spent three days moving around the house like we both just got ran over by Grave Digger – the wonderful result of the free family weekend day.
Now I can’t wait to get there in the morning, and I feel better all day knowing that I’ve accomplished something – bragging to my co-workers about “the finisher” or how much I hate “insert the name of ridiculous exercise here.”
The exercises change.
The faces at the gym change.
And Jason – ever so slowly – changes.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
But if I work hard enough I might be able to get to the point where I can use a marble ball for squatting jump slams just to get the right balance of cardio and legs. Maybe do a little Rome building at the same time.
Hold on a second.
I’ve got to get up off the couch.
