Some Motivation Required

Why’s this here?  What’s this blog about?  Who the hell are you and why should I care what you’re going on about?

All good questions.  My name’s Brian, I’m a 27 year old guy in Seattle, Washington, who wants to share his love of fitness and athletics and the day to day life lived around that.

To be honest, I should have probably started this blog about a year ago.  A little over year ago, at the end of February 2009, I was in a pretty lousy place.  Feeling pretty aimless, fighting depression and stress, things pretty much sucked.  A friend of mine who worked as a trainer on the side offered me a steal of a rate, $25 a session.

This isn’t where the transformative change begins.  Like I’d done for years before, I wrote it off, told myself I couldn’t really afford an extra hundred bucks a month at a single session a week, that I was too busy, etc.  No, it was when I stepped on the doctor’s office scale a few weeks later and saw 288.8, highest number I’d ever seen on a scale.

I think about then I realized I couldn’t afford *not* to spend at least an extra hundred a month on training, not sacrifice a chunk of my time to exercise or not change how I ate.  I called up Hannah and didn’t look back.

Turned out the decision was the hardest part.  Not to say that exercise isn’t hard to get into, or that eating is easy to change.  But fear is a powerful motivator and all you need is motivation and a commitment that goes to the bone.  I started setting true goals that I was going to stick to and arranging my life for success.  In addition to working with Hannah once a week, and sticking to her cardio lifting routine three times a week, I began power walking the three alternate days, tracking everything I ate on my phone, tracking my milage by GPS and generally consuming as much fitness and nutrition research as I could.

The pounds began peeling off, and by summer, I was shifting to running.  By October, I ran my first 5K and was up to running my entire routes, pushing my milage each week.  By the new year, I committed to my first marathon, to be run November 2010.  By one year later, the proof is in the pudding.

Now?  I’m pushing 25 miles a week, just finished my first half marathon run and well in line for my first half marathon race in three months.  It completely changed my life, I’m happy, healthy, confident and more goal oriented than I’ve ever been.  Once I finish my first marathon, that’ll just be one more goal of many to come.  It started as abject fear of where I was headed and a wish for a better life.  Now I’m in this till the day I die, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Is still difficult to get off the couch and do my workout, or make the choice to avoid that unhealthy meal?  Absolutely.  But it’s now a challenge to be overcome.  I look forward to every one of them, and that’s what I’m hoping to share here.

This blog is here because I’d like to share that, daily experience with the journey, new methods and recipes, and in general, a little bit of that force of will that helped me out when I most needed it.  My hope is that I can help someone find their fundamental change too.

Everyone can do it.  There’s just always some motivation required.