So, umm, yeah, this is my first post in this category. Please don't throw anything too heavy at me.
A brief back history: I was the champion of bad health all the way through college. Greasy burgers and pizza, barrels of beer & 2 packs of smokes a day and weighed 265, standing only 5 foot 6 inches tall, err, short.
Then one day I decided enough! I gave up smoking cold turkey on New Years Eve 2009 and radically changed my diet. No sugar, fat free everything, diet drinks & a gallon of water a day, and baked chicken & salad as staple meals a few times a week. In June of 2009 I started lifting weights again & ran around the local park a few times a week. In August, just when i started to have room in my jeans I was admitted for an emergency back surgery & was off my feet til October. Go figure, start getting healthy & my lower spine takes me out. Doctors said I had an abscess the size of a golf ball caused by situps. (Sorry if that was TMI).
Started my new job in October of 2009 and weighed 265 still. Doctors gave me the ok to go back to exercising in January. Bought a treadmill & my life changed. All of a sudden I found my new 'high' in life was control. I found for the first time i wasn't a slave to cigarettes or junk food, that I had ALL the control in my life.
So here it is almost a year later, and I am down to 225, dropped a size, and just did my first 5k last month (hill course, 44 mins). My longest run so far was 6.2 on the treadmill, wanna say it was around 2 hours tho, lol.
I have lurked in here a few times but never posted until I read Erin's post. So far my best run is 2 miles in 26 minutes. Erin, you have nothing to be embarrassed of. I keep my positive frame of mind by realizing how far I've come, and reminding myself that the average couch potato runs 0.0 miles a week.
But I see where Erin is coming from. I read Donald's weekly run distances & times & it makes me wanna lay in traffic. But we all gotta start somewhere right? I think it's better to do something than nothing at all. It's easy to quit. But making yourself run or workout when you don't want to is so much more fulfilling than sitting on the couch.
I thank all of you for the info you share about your runs & have found that lately it has motivated my runs a little. I never in a million years thought I'd post in here as my runs are on such a small scale as compared to most of yours. But then again I never thought I'd be a non-smoker with a treadmill.
Thanks to all of you for posting, and thanks for tolerating my n00b rambling. I may not be running 47 miles a day with a 7 minute average, lol, but I do run 5 days a week & have recently started the P90X ab workout on Tuesdays & Thursdays. My goal is to run the 2012 Disney 1/2 marathon. I'll keep you posted, ha ha.
Thanks all. Have a good run!
