Olympic Experience

The Olympics have been awesome this year! I have always followed the Olympics, even when I was a small child, and I remember the U.S. beating Russia in Ice Hockey. I remember watching the Dream Team dominate. I remember watching the greatest athletes of all time--Edwin Moses, Michael Johnson, Carl Lewis, Flo Jo. But never--NEVER-- have I experienced the Olympics like I did the other night watching the men's 4 x 100 freestyle relay. I'm not going to go into details because there is no way to describe what I saw. That victory was truly the most thrilling race of all time.

Lindon Days 5K

I've talked about doing it for a couple years and on Saturday I finally did it--I ran my first 5K. Dusty, who has been running pretty regularly for the past couple of years, told me about the Lindon Days 5K and convinced me to register. I didn't come away with a trophy, a medal, or even a ribbon, but I did beat my personal best by close to four minutes with a time of 27:24 and finished fourth in my age group (35-40). Everyone else did awesome as Dust finished second in the 30 - 34 group (somewhere around 19 minutes), Derek, Emi, and Hailey all finished first in their respective divisions, Frisco finished third in the Fun Run 1/2 Mile for boys 10-11, and Vanessa finished second overall in the Fun Run 1/2 Mile.
In retrospect, we had a great day and plan on doing these runs a little more often. We're even considering going down to Bryce Canyon with Dusty next summer and running the Bryce Canyon half marathon. I know that Lance has been running alot and hope that he can get the time off work to go, too. Let us know if anyone else is interested.

Weight Loss

The other day I was sitting with a few friends from work when we started to talk about the UFC. For those of you not familiar with the UFC, it is the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a competition that involves a mixture of all the martial arts. During our conversation, my boss stated that if he were to lose 30 lbs. and get to his prime weight that he would be able to beat the middleweight champion, George St. Pierre. The discussion became a little heated as he was really serious about his statement. Ultimately, we concluded that we all were overweight and needed to stop talking about getting in shape and actually do it, so we all committed to lose 10 percent of our body weight. Of course, this all happened while we were sitting at McDonalds finishing our Big Macs, Double Cheeseburgers, large fries, and supersized soft drinks.
Now, we couldn't just do this for the heck of it; we needed to post something. We all decided to put in $25 dollars with the idea that the first to lose the weight would take the money. But we didn't want the rest to feel like failures and gain back anything that the may have lost, so we also decided that if all participants reached the goal of 10%, all of us would go to Vegas (Ana still doesn't know about that part.)
Before we could start, we needed to verify our weight. Since WalMart was right next to McDonalds, we all walked over, grabbed a scale off the aisle, and stepped up to see the gory details. While I won't mention the weight of the others, I will admit to being on the verge of obesity, tipping the scales at a plump 200 lbs. even. That meant that I would need to lose 20 lbs. in order to go to Vegas and do it faster than the others in order to win the money.
All of this happened 2 1/2 weeks ago and, needless to say, no one has achieved the goal yet but all of us have progressed. The first week, I dropped 5 lbs. to 195. A few days later I had lost another two pounds and was at 193. Since that last weigh in I stopped weighing myself--until today. Today I stepped on the scale and read 184.6. Thats an incredible weight loss of 15.4 lbs in 2 1/2 weeks and only 4.6 lbs. from my goal of 180.
Many of you might think that most of this is water loss or I am putting myself at risk; however, the great thing about being obese is that you carry horrible habits, such as: 200- 300 ounces of Coke a day (and that was probably cutting in half what I used to drink), extreme portions, and late night eating. I just needed to change my ways. Having overcome those habits, losing the weight has pretty much been downhill from there. Not to mention that I am now running about 15 - 20 miles a week. Who would have thought that a meaningless arguement could have lead to such an important change in my life.