The Final Countdown

So there’s about four weeks left to my 35th birthday (December 31st), the day I set in my sights as the marker for finishing my goal to lose 140 pounds. At the moment I am 25 pounds away from my final goal. The reality is that I’m not going to get all 140 pounds lost by my birthday, but when I started the process of trying to lose weight and inculcating healthier habits into my lifestyle, I tried to make projected allowances for life and the ultimate lack of control one sometimes has over one’s body. I told myself that even if I was 10-20 pounds off I would still shoot for 140 in order to keep me motivated. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t plan to stop just because my birthday will come and go and I will have 10-20 pounds left to lose.


I tentatively started the process of losing weight in July of 2009 when my brother talked me into tacking another 3 weeks onto a visit with his family at the end of a stay that had already lasted 3 weeks. The first 3 weeks I read and loafed. The second three weeks I worked my butt off (in between more reading and loafing). Earlier in the year Glenn had challenged his 16-year-old son to do an Olympic distance triathlon, in preparation they had worked up to it with several smaller, sprint triathlons. In the true spirit of older sibling cajoling, he committed me to do one in the summer of 2011. At the time I was no where near physically able or mentally ready to train for a triathlon, even a sprint triathlon; so in the meantime he contented himself with cracking a work-out whip that had me exercising three times a day: 30 minutes on the elliptical machine, 20 minutes of swimming, and an hour or more of walking. I remember agreeing to this plan because I wanted to prove to him that I was capable of doing all that work, but usually I chose not to. I didn’t lose a lot of weight, if any, during those three weeks, but I came home with a different sense of who I was, or rather who I could be. In August I continued to walk and watched my diet, cutting out sugar altogether; I lost 15 pounds that month. Fueled by success, I resolved to lose 140 pounds by my 35th birthday (16 months from then). I called Glenn and talked him into going off sugar with me for a year (when younger siblings cajole it’s called whining, by the way)—just to see if I could do it (actually it didn’t take much convincing, he readily agreed to ax sugar with me).

It’s been 15 months since that conversation and I can now wear a size 12 (I started at a 24), I am able to run 10 miles, I completed a triathlon (a year early) this past July, and I’m over 3/4th of the way to my weight loss goal. So during the next two and four weeks I will be counting down the time to two important dates—December 18th, the day I will run a half marathon, and December 31st—my 35th birthday and my day of reckoning. J I plan to work my hynie off over the next 4 weeks and try and get as much weight off as possible, in order to meet my deadline. And, I’m actually a little terrified to run 13.1 miles in the real race. Not that I plan on or care about placing, but I’ve been running on a gym treadmill for at least a month now (cold weather), and I just don’t want to end up lying on the side of the road, curled up in a fetal position because the race terrain is so much different than the treadmill. That being said, if you’re a praying person, on December 18th, say one in my behalf, PLEASE!