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.