Week Four: Robert

All right. One month in, four weeks, 29 days, and at 202 pounds. It feels like so much longer between snacks. First up: I have a little snacking to do. It’s a little piece of pie; I know pie isn’t exactly on the Freshman 15 menu, but this is special pie. It’s zero-calorie humble pie. After getting the ragged on a bit for some of my earlier posts I have this to say: before I broke my wrist I was not Zeus, Hercules, or Apollo nor, for that matter, Apollo Creed. I was just a normal guy with a husky build.

With that bit of housekeeping over with, on to the story so far. I found a squash partner, which is sweet: I now get to pull out my ’80s kicks. These are classic squash shoes, of course: Adidas, grey suede with blue and white stripping, and the gummy no streak sole. Perfect for squash, but too light for burning the requisite weight.

Of course, my major recent accomplishment: I made it onto CBC Radio. This was a great experience, because now not only is campus keeping tabs on me, but the city. It’s almost surprising how many people I know listen to CBC at 8 a.m. There’s the family up the street, my boss, a few people from church, and just a few other random people I know. This experience has also opened up a lot of new opportunities.

One of those opportunities is that a friend of mine was talking to me about doing the sprint triathlon at the U of A and convinced me to join up. So, I now have a new goal in training for that. It’ll happen right after this experiment ends, so it will be great to see how I have done in training. At the moment, my tentative goal is just over two hours for a 750 metre swim, 20 kilometre bike ride, and 5 km run. This is going on my guess that the swim will take 20 minutes, 50 minutes on the bike, and 40 minutes for the run. It seems logical in my head, but we will see in the coming weeks how that works in reality. Hopefully, this will also help me with my original goal of rugby shape by March.

Rugby shape by March was a non-quantitative goal, and so far I haven’t seen many qualitative results. I don’t feel like I can run longer, swim further, or play squash any harder. It’s been interesting. On the flip side, I have seen the quantitative milestones and they’ve been much more motivational. Down 7 pounds - yay!!!

I have also been training my dodging, dipping, ducking, diving, and dodging for the upcoming Dare to Dodge event of the Campus Cup dodgeball competition. This intensive program will most likely mean I will go out in a blaze of glory, as soon as I realize we’re not dodging wrenches — all that training down the drain. So, if you are feeling any pity or want a good laugh, come watch the Gateway’s team on Sunday.

All in all it’s been a good month: changing my eating, sleeping, and drinking habits. I’ve exercised more, and even though I’ve spent much more time in the gym, I seem to get a lot more done. Although this last month seems full of warm, soft, and fuzzy things, it was difficult and annoying at times.

This upcoming month should be a big one: if all goes well, I’ll be dropping under 200 pounds. Wish me luck!