A bit of history - part 1

OK ... I guess before I start yammering away about things I should give a few details about where I am in my life and how I got to this place.

I'm 45 years old.  I've been married to my wife (Pam) for nearly 24 years.  We have a 20 years old son (Timmy) who is currently going to a community college and plans on transferring to a university in the future.  My family is very important to me, and I will speak of them often in my entries.

For nearly 10 years ... actually for nearly 30 years I have been interested in endurance sports - marathon, long distance cycling, ironman triathlon and so on.  For the last 10 years or so I've trained on and off in an attempt to reach certain goals - complete certain events, and to this point I have a lot of failure to show for it.  My latest attempt was over 2 years ago when I was training for a marathon.  Although overweight I was staying on target with my training ... until I tweaked my Achilles tendon, that is.  That event sent me into a fitness tailspin I wasn't sure I'd recover from.

In addition to the disappointment of injuring myself and being unable to do much of anything, I began to notice Pam was just not acting like herself.  I won't go into any details, but after months of watching her and feeling helpless because I couldn't do anything for her she was diagnosed with depression and anxiety.  It was rough, but as rough as it was to sit by and not be able to help, I know it was much more difficult for her to deal with the issues.

After more than 10 months of absolutely no training, and having gained back the majority of the weight I had lost during my years of intermittent training, I was finally and desperately ready to become active again ... except Pam was still struggling, and my work life became incredibly overwhelming, and in the little time I did find to train I wound up suffering many minor but aggravating injuries.

For as long as I can remember I've enjoyed writing - mostly poetry and fiction short stories.  From the tail end of 2008 through the first part of 2009 I turned back to writing as an outlet.  Expressing thoughts, feelings, frustrations, joy through my writing was definitely a sanity saver.  Again, work and other issues gave me little or no free time to pursue what I enjoyed ...


This blog is designed to keep me on track with my training.  I hope to track my progress, discuss my goals and maybe even share an accomplishment or two along the way.  I will have many entries that will be primarily training numbers - running, biking, swimming and other cross training I do throughout 2011 and beyond.  I will not discuss my weight, weight loss, diet or anything else along those lines ... except, of course, when I reach my weight goal - but that will not be for quite a while.  For now it will suffice to say that I am very overweight, and despite that fact I am once again training.

I will also have many entries that have nothing to do with training.  I will discuss my ups and downs, my work, my family, issues and irritations as well as accomplishments and joys.  I tend to go on long, random, rambling tangents that really have nothing to do with anything (just giving fair warning in case yo actually read what I write).  I look forward to keeping this blog.  I will not promise to post every day as I do not always have things to say, but I will update my status on a regular basis.