The last few pounds that you have to work off are simultaneously the most frustrating and the most elating of your life. On the one hand, you have successfully made the transition from losing poundage so fast that there’s a slight “whooshing” sound to only being able to crack the -2 pound mark if you get a long-overdue haircut. But at the same time, dropping one pound your first month doesn’t feel like a big deal. Dropping one pound when you’re within 18 lbs of your goal weight? Cue up some Jay-Z and witness my celebratory dancing, people.
But seeing my target weight fast approach opens up an entire host of questions, chief among them: “Where the hell do I go from here?” I feel that I’ve gotten fairly proficient at how to live my life in order to reduce my circumference, but maintaining it and refining my physical fitness is uncharted territory. To put it bluntly, I haven’t needed to become an expert on physical fitness so long as I ran out of breath trying to spell it. While I would love to have a personal trainer shepherd me along the rocky paths to a body that I can be proud of, my budget tends to squawk loudly when I pay my water bill. The high, HIGH costs of personal training would give it a fatal heart attack.
I have set some short and long-term goals for myself. I would like to run the annual Susan B Komen Breast Cancer 5K in Nashville. The idea of running a 5K is intimidating, but considering that my mother beat the shit out breast cancer in such stylish fashion that it should have been narrated by WWE announcers, I don’t have much room to complain. There are lots of resources out there to help people ease into running that far, so I hope to take advantage of them.
The idea of doing a 5K is intimidating, yes. But there is one challenge that has, for a very long time, seemed as unlikely an achievement as playing a round of golf on the moon or finding a Justin Bieber song that doesn’t make me want to punch baby panda bears. It’s something that’s ridiculously easy for many people, so bear with me on this.
I want to be able to do a pull-up.
Smug bastard.
Now, yes, in the long-term I would like to be able to do many pull-ups. But that’s a foreign concept to me. The pull-up has long been the one exercise that I could never do. Even when I was in moderately good shape, fresh out of Navy boot camp (stop your snickering. At least it wasn’t Air Force boot camp. That’s right, wing wipers. I said it.), I would step up to the bar, leap up and get a firm grip, and promptly dangle there like a sweaty, wheezing baby mobile, swaying ever so gently in the breeze as children batted at me with sticks, thinking that candy would come bursting out. All the good intentions in the world weren’t enough to make gravity any less of a cast-iron son of a bitch, determined to make me look like a dangling sack of ham, no more likely to ascend towards the heavens than a hamstrung hippopotamus.
I have a plan, stemmed from advice provided by the excellent site Nerd Fitness, and it is beginning to show results. I’ve reached the monumental point of being able to twitch, ever so gently, in the upwards direction. You should see it. It’s like watching a baby deer take its very first steps, if those steps were immediately followed by the fawn vomiting noisily on the ground and collapsing into a tangled pile of limbs while adorable woodland creatures laughed until they urinated.
But what the hell. In five months, I’ve stripped close to seventy pounds off of my body. I never thought I could actually do that. So maybe the concept of hoisting my goatee north of that bar isn’t as ludicrous as it used to be. At the very least, that’s a shitload of weight I don’t have to carry with me on my trip up. One day, I will post video of me completing that pull-up, and it will be backed by unjustifiably triumphant music. Try not to roll your eyes too hard.
Jan. 2, 2013 Starting Weight: 280 lbs
May 19, 2013 Weigh-In: 216 lbs
Total Weight Loss in 133 days: 64 lbs
