Of how it all started: Mid to late teens

This follows on from my previous 2 posts.

Previously we were up to Jan 2009. I had just had to acknowledge my complete dismal failure at training for a half marathon. Not good!

It came at a bad time for me, as other things were going on in my family life at this time, which I won't go into at this point. Suffice to say my training slipped completely.

From there onwards I had a couple of brief spurts where I would go to the gym for a month or so, but for the most part I was getting on with other aspects of my life which were more important at the time. During a period of unemployment I had been stupid enough to run up large debts on credit cards, as well as getting myself banned from driving. It wasn't a good year for me.

By late 2009 and early 2010 I had finally started to sort out the mess I had got myself in, and life was coming back on track, after a minor detour.

Unfortunately it takes a lot longer to dig your way our of life's problems than it does to get into them. Sorting my life out (especially financially) had become my number one priority so I didn't even have time to think about the gym for a long time.

Although I had been in a stable job for a several months by then, it was late 2010 by the time I was living comfortably again. By then the previous version of me that weighed 150lbs at school and could cycle across countries without breaking a sweat was a long and distant memory, and the on-again off-again gymaholic, who had lost 50lbs in just 4 months, felt like an eternity ago.

Fast forward once again, this time to September 2011. Just a few months ago. I was 27 (still am, at least for a couple more weeks).

I hadn't been to a gym at all for quite a while and it showed. I was still a way off the 250lbs that I had been a few years before, but I was visibly growing again. This time there was no way I was going to let it go as far as it did before, so when my friend Nathan said he'd just signed up at the swankiest gym in town, I was quick to join him, with big plans to get myself back in shape once again.

This brings us up to (more or less) present day in my story.

To be continued...

Of how it all started: Late teens and early 20s

This follows on from my previous post.

Where was I? It was the year 2000 and I had just left school, very skinny and very fit.

Skip forward about 5-6 years, to early/mid 2006. I was now 22.

After leaving school I had initially maintained some amount of daily activity, but as a few more years went on I discovered partying. And booze. And junk food. Quite quickly, my healthy school life was put well behind me.

After several years of this lifestyle, I gradually gained a whopping 100lbs, to put me around 250lbs.

Suddenly I was fat all over again. There was no two ways about it, and no hiding behind "big bones" or any other excuse. I was fat. This was (and still is) the heaviest I've ever been.

Having been big as a child, I found it mortifying that I was back there again.

Due to my height, even at 250lbs I carried the weight a lot better than a shorter person would, but nonetheless I didn't feel good and I didn't look good either. Something had to be done, but when it came to dieting I was almost completely clueless, so I took a different route and started going to the gym. A few of my friends had joined up recently so it seemed like a good time for me to start going too.

When I had my induction, the girl showing me around asked how often I'd be coming to work out. When I told her I would turn up 5 days a week, every day after work, she laughed it off and told me I need to have more realistic goals. I didn't like that very much.

Sure enough, I went to the gym every single day after work, religiously. I didn't really know what I was doing, but every day I would wander around the cardio machines until I worked up a really good sweat and my legs ached, then go and do a little work on some resistance machines.

I didn't touch the free weights because they were in a separate little room that was full of "meatheads", which at the time was quite intimidating.

I did try to eat better too, but I didn't really know anything about nutrition. I could't have told you what a calorie is, or how much protein I need (or even what protein does), or much of anything else. My attempt to eat better  was based on only the most obvious info that everybody knows, i.e. pizzas and kebabs are bad, salads are good.

My regime wasn't structured well at all, but the sheer volume of exercise I was doing more than compensated for that, and it all worked exceptionally well.

In just 4 months I lost over 50lbs. What a result! I could hardly believe it. I felt happy again.

Unfortunately after I lost 50lbs, it started to get harder to lose, which meant that inevitably I lost interest in the gym when the results were more scarce.

Fast forward again, this time to 2008. I was 24. For 2-3 years since the big weight loss, I'd been going through phases of joining a gym, attending for a few months, and quitting. I was expecting big results far too quickly, and when it wasn't happening, I was getting bored and apathetic.

In mid 2008 I had (mostly) kept the weight off, but I was floundering aimlessly, and my routine was in desperate need of organising into proper goals and targets other than "I want to get fit and look good". I decided to train for a half marathon. I thought that having specific something to aim for would really help me.

Now, I should say that I've never been a natural runner at all. Even when I weighed practically nothing at school, when I was in peak fitness, I was a very strong cyclist but a terrible, terrible runner. Still, the run in my hometown was in June so I thought I had plenty of time to train for it. I got back to the gym and started to hit the treadmill every day. I was using the resistance machines too, but only ever after my cardio sessions were done and I couldn't run any more.

I started from a point where I could barely run half a mile.

By Jan 2009, after several months of hardcore training, I could run about 6 miles, which was a great achievement for me. I had improved a hell of a lot, but nonetheless I was starting to realise that I still wasn't progressing fast enough and there was no way I was going to make the half marathon.

Disheartened, I quit the gym and told everyone that I couldn't make the run, citing my "lead feet" as the main excuse.

It was not a good moment for me.

Of how it all started: School Life

Lets rewind all the way back to my school life for a brief history lesson.

Right back to the beginning. I was a very chubby child and grew up having to live through being "the fat one" in middle school. It was not a happy time for me. I must have managed to block out most of it because I have remarkably few memories from middle school at all.

I remember that growing up, I lived in a house where my mum always mentioned trying to be healthy, but my parents were never really able to follow through on what they talked about. They were both pretty big themselves, and food was very much used as a treat - "If you've been good, you can have sweets". I guess a lot of kids grew up fat this way, with parents who meant well but were far too ready to dismiss their children's  weight gains as "puppy fat".

That's what everyone used to say it was - "puppy fat" - but I didn't think so, and I guess eventually mum started to think otherwise too because at some point there was a definite shift towards trying to get us all healthier. I remember one day I came home from school and mum declared that we weren't having chips for dinner (fries, for the yanks) because chips were now only going to be once a week. Nor could we have a fry up, because she wasn't going to fry much anymore, instead opting to grill the sausages, bacon, and anything else she could fit under the grill.

It was far from a complete change in diet, and arguably wasn't really enough, but luckily at the same time I also had a sudden growth spurt that never seemed to end, so by the time I went to Upper School I was extremely tall and super, super skinny.

Fortunately at the same time as graduating onwards to my next school, I was also being moved to a different family of school, so I was to meet a whole new set of friends who had never known the fat version of me. The fat kid had been all but erased from history, but it wasn't quite that easy to shake off the way I felt and in all honesty I was always "the fat kid" in my head for a few more years.

My 4 years at upper school were very, very active. I may have been thin when I started, but I was in peak fitness by the time I left. My friends and I had become quite heavily into basketball, and it didn't seem to bother us that none of us were very good at it. We played before school, after school, at lunch time and at both break times. We usually went out cycling every night after school too.

We didn't do it because it was exercise, we did it because it was fun, but nonetheless I was very fit at the time, and I didn't have an ounce of body fat on me.

I weighed just over 150lbs. Considering my height, this was arguably too small, but I felt good and I felt like I looked good.

I had finally shaken off the fat kid persona from inside my head.

This was late in the year 2000. Life was good.

Of how it all started: The Harmless Question

When somebody says something to you that that touches a nerve, it can hurt.

It was April 19th 2012 - just a few days ago - and what hurt most about the question I had just been asked, was that it touched a nerve I didn't even know I had. My sudden wave of emotion was completely unexpected.

It was a fairly harmless sort of thing that I had been asked via a message on Facebook:

what's your gymming looking like atm? still training like an animal?

If  anyone else had asked the question I would probably had brushed it off with some sort of generic reply. It's the sort of innocuous question that usually gets asked at social events as part of the general chit-chat and small talk, and usually a generic response of "it's going well, thanks" is more than adequate.

But not this time. This was different, for 2 reasons.

First of all it was different because of the person asking it. Ricky is heavily into weightlifting himself, and is consistently working on getting larger and leaner. Because of this I know that the question wasn't idle chit-chat, he was showing a genuine interest in my current routine, so the question deserved more than a generic response, and it made me think properly about my answer.

Secondly it was different because I haven't seen Ricky since before Christmas. Around this time I was considerably happier with my state of fitness than I am currently. Whereas the physical change in my appearance has been more gradual to people I see more regularly, to Ricky I would be an unrecognisably different shape to what I was back in December

Panic set in when I thought about how best to answer his surprisingly penetrating question. I felt oddly guilty, almost as though I was about to break the news that I had let down the side, by screwing up my fitness goals. For this reason I was shy to answer. It crossed my mind to respond with something generic after all, but instead I opted for honesty and went on to pour my heart out onto this Facebook wall post, telling all about my ups and downs, my victories and losses, my trials and tribulations, as if trying to justify it all to myself.

Afterwards I didn't feel guilty any more.

I felt euphoric.

It was like a weight had been taken from my shoulders.

The nerve that I didn't know I had was a guilty one. I had felt guilty for allowing myself to mess up my goals so badly and get so far off track, and the feeling had been residing in the back of my mind, where I had kept it well hidden so far.

Catharsis had felt great and left me feeling like, at last, I had finally been able to learn from my mistakes and move on. It was then that I decided to share my experiences of absolute dismal failure, in the hope that a negative lesson can be just as valuable to learn as a positive one.

This blog was born.