This is really funny.  Each day when I get home from work one of the first questions my dad asks me, typically the first, is if I went to the gym today.  Yes, I know it’s cold and yes I know that it may be windy or rainy on a particular day, but my dad knows that I went to the gym the morning after one of the biggest ice freezes we could remember.  Ice and having to slide on my butt didn’t stop me from getting to the gym, so it always amusingly baffles me as to why my dad would seriously ask me if I didn’t go to the gym that day.

Sure, it’s not fun to go to the gym in the rain or when the old temperatures are exacerbated by the wind, but once I get on the bus then everything is fine.  Once I get in the gym, I’m building so much body heat that I forget being cold at all within minutes.  There have been days where my dad has even said, “this is probably a stupid question, but…did you go to the gym today?”  He’ll catch on one of these days, but excluding any return of “Snow-My God” from last year, I’ll be at the gym each morning before work pushing myself and getting inch by inch closer to where I have always wanted to get myself.

Each step I have striven to be normal and in doing so I am finding what it means to be extraordinary.  What I am feeling from what I have gained is amazing and the motivation it gives me can’t be thwarted by any rain, snow or wind.  I’ve got my determination and when you have it, never let it go.  I never plan to, no matter how many times my dad tempts me to sleep in.

I went to a Redskins game Sunday night because a friend had free tickets on club level.  I figure that I can go and, when it gets cold, I just go inside and get warm.  It worked out rather well.  We even left early after the Redskins were losing and beat traffic back.

On the drive back, my friend’s two guy friends were talking about how they hate GPSs and how they ruin the driving experience.  I should have figured out that they were engineers, but it made complete since when my friend told me this after the fact, when we got in her car and she pulled out her own GPS.

This conversation really made me realize the difference between highly educated intelligence and raw intelligence.  As impressive as the intelligence revealed by those studying science, medicine and other advanced fields is, I think we often forget the value coming from real life experiences and the lessons/knowledge derived and passed on from those experiences.

This is a huge topic that I had written about in An Uncharted Life, and though I don’t want to give away the chapter, I do want to at least bring up how important both types of intelligence are.  Yes, they can work together, but one form is not any better or higher than the other.  They both impact our lives in many, and differing, ways.

This is a huge topic that I had written about in An Uncharted Life, and though I don’t want to give away the chapter, I do want to at least bring up how important both types of intelligence are.  Yes, they can work together, but one form is not any better or higher than the other.  They both impact our lives in many, and differing, ways.

I learn so much from my best friend, who is about to get his master’s in aerospace engineering.  We talk once a week and, in turn, he winds up learning just as much from me.  They work hand in hand in creating who we are and progressing everything around us.  I know the importance of technology and the infrastructure that is constantly evolving around us, but I fear that too large a schism is being created between the intellectual intelligence and the appreciation of what can be taught and learned from real life experience.

There’s no true conclusion to this, just an observation.  The further we progress the more it seems we value one form of knowledge over the other.  All I hope is that people like my uncle, who builds tree houses and made his own cane on his own despite living with Parkinson’s disease, and these independent shop owners who invest everything they are and have into their own businesses continue to be valued for all that they are.  We get so caught up in numerical and financial figures, but let’s not forget about the grit, passion and determination that established everything to begin with.  Without one form of intelligence, the other is baseless.  How perfectly they work together and complement each other is the reason we have gotten where we currently are.  Maybe if we start valuing both equally again, we’ll get ourselves back on the track we have been striving to gain.

As of this month, I have officially kept my weight off for 4 years now.  I weighed up to 265 pounds in 2006, stepped on a scale in May 2006, read the scale at 253 pounds and swore that this would be the heaviest I would ever be again.  I went out that day and ran.  I only ran a quarter mile, but that’s all I needed for a start.  I ran a quarter mile that day, and then I ran a quarter mile and a little bit further the next day.  I kept doing that until, before I knew it, I was running 5 miles a day come October.
All that consistent running caused me to lose weight very quickly.  I became emaciated because I focused solely on weight loss and didn’t focus on muscle development until after I reached my target weight.  I’ve tried doing both simultaneously, and even though that is ideal, it is too long a process to be focused enough through if you wanted to lose 50 pounds.  By mid December I weighed 200.8 pounds.  Now, I do not weigh 200.8 pounds anymore.  I am up somewhere near 220 at this point.  The thing is, in the last 4 years, I have been redeveloping my body to that ideal place I want it to be.  I have put on muscle each year and, in the process, have reduced my body fat percentage and kept it at bay.  As long as my body fat doesn’t rise, I don’t mind putting on weight because I know that the weight I have put on is healthy.  Muscle weighs more than fat and takes that much longer to put on your body properly.

It’s weird; ever since I lost the weight, my fear has been gaining it back.  At first when I was gaining weight, I feared that I was losing my metabolism and that this attempt to lose weight was just as futile as the perennial ones I made each summer while I was in school.  Now that it is 4 years later, I’m realizing a couple things.  First off, I have changed my lifestyle.  Splurging before was completely different than splurging now.  Heck, the way I used to eat regularly then is my form of splurging now.  I’ve learned to keep things in perspective, and now I’m realizing that I have been doing that innately for years now.

That leads me into the second thing I have learned, and that is that I can just relax.  I’m staying active across the day.  That, combined with my acquired lifestyle change, is keeping me where I have always wanted to be.  I don’t have to torture myself to maintain where I am.  I’m doing it on my own due to how I’m living my life.  And since I have made this lifestyle transformation, the last thing I have learned is that it is okay to splurge every now and then, now that I have a true perspective on what a splurge is.  Having ice cream or nachos once a week is not going to cause me to gain ten pounds back.  (Yes there was a time where I feared that.)  Now that my mass is more muscle than anything else, my weight has been much more controlled and the extreme fluctuations have been eliminated now that I have abandoned the extreme measures I underwent to lose weight 4 years ago.

Ultimately, what I have learned over the last 4 years is that I’m in a good spot.  I understand where I am and have realized that I have had control over my life for a good while now.  That’s all that I have been seeking.  Every summer when I lost weight, I gained it back before I knew it.  I spent the entire summer pushing myself and lost it without even realizing.  I was convinced I didn’t have control over myself.  That’s gone now.  I realized that you need to make a lifestyle change.  Weight loss is temporary, but the lifestyle to keep weight off remains.  It becomes part of you and, like I said, you learn how to adapt and enjoy life without gorging.  I splurge; I don’t gorge.

More importantly than enjoying my splurge days from my diet, I’ve learned to just enjoy life again.  I don’t live in fear that every little thing will be the banana peel that makes me slip back to where I was 4 years ago.  4 years is a long time, and though I always view myself as the fat kid because that is all that I have known, I now have discovered that I am a healthy and fit man.  Losing weight gave me confidence, but apparently it took 4 years to embrace it fully.  Better late than never and now I can just continue the life I’m living because I now realized that I have not had any reason to do otherwise.

I woke up on New Year’s Day feeling fine, but across the day I was hit hard with a head cold, nose congested and just feeling drained.  Of course I take Saturday and rest since it is my normal rest day, but come Sunday I was right back at the gym on my routine.  I have felt groggy and congested all week, and it has gotten a tiny bit better each day.  If I wake up and can move, I’m going to the gym.  That’s how I always have been.

If I can motivate myself to move, I will.  It’s the same outlook I have with certain types of soreness.  Sometimes it is better to work through it than let it put you up and out for a given length of time. The workout isn’t usually fun, but I feel miserable anyways so why not do something productive?

I’ve been feeling this cold for a few days now and today it is finally breaking up.  My head is a little disoriented (please don’t any of my brain surgery survivors freak out…it’s nothing!) but my nose isn’t blocked much at all anymore.  I guess the leg press lifts yesterday did some good.  That, or maybe the fact that  slept through my alarm this morning and got a half hour extra sleep than I intended on.  Regardless, I’m feeling better today and haven’t missed a day from this week’s workouts.  As important as it is to listen to your body, sometimes you have to push your body in order to get yourself better.  It’s no different than pushing yourself in life.  You’re just taking yourself to a level you haven’t been to before, but once you get there the reward is all you walk away with feeling.

I’m still sick.  I’m getting better, but when I finished my leg press yesterday all I felt was that accomplishment.  I completely forgot about being sick until I sneezed while getting water.  Hey…take your victories where you get them, right? =)