The Journey - Part II: The Speed Bump

By late October, I was in a pretty good routine of running 2 miles, 3 times a week at our local riverfront park. But then I hit my first speed bump - weather.

Now lots of folks are fine running in the rain and cold. They laugh at the elements. They will run when it's so cold their sweet freezes.

I'm not one of those people.

The temperature was starting to get much cooler. Like "I need a jacket" cold. Plus, we had a really raining October/November. While I had run in the rain in the summer, running in the cold rain was no fun. I'm already miserable running, and so adding in rain and cold did not make it any more enjoyable. I gave it an honest go, but I couldn't make it to the half mile mark without turning around.

Running wasn't going to work for me in inclement weather, and still didn't want to join a gym. But I was still at 220 with more weight to drop, so I wasn't going to give up. For a few weeks, I tried doing aerobics, like Jillian Michaels: Banish Fat, Boost Metabolism program. I thought I could handle it, but that thing was tough. I was able to get 20 minutes into it, and was exhausted. So I was very spotty in my aerobics work, which was no good.

I did learn one positive thing from the Jillian Michaels work out, and that was the importance of doing a good warm up. She makes the point that muscles are like rubber bands - if a rubber band is cold and you start to pull it, it will break. Same things with muscles; if you start to use them before they're really warmed up, then you can pull a muscle. I'm really big on avoid injury, so I took this to heart, and have tried to do a warm up of some kind before starting exercise ever since.

In any event, I got to a point where I had not been exercising for a couple of weeks in December, other than taking some walks on the weekend. I knew I had to do something to get back on track.

Around this same, my 13 year old sister-in-law that was living with us was told by the doctor that she was in danger of developing juvenile onset diabetes. She weighted 217 pounds, only a couple of pounds less than me. We had tried to get her to do aerobics, but she made little effort. I knew we had to do something to get this to change.

So on December 31, I went out and got a Wii Fit. This proved to be the thing that got me over this speed bump.