Day 1 & 2

Losing a lot of weight sure is easy to say. I’ve said it a hundred times in the last week. Now it’s time to get started, and I feel like I am standing at the base of a huge mountain struggling with how to take the first step. The real question is not what to do, it’s more how much to do. I haven’t done any serious exercise in years, and I have no idea how my body is going to react.

Start small, I guess, and find out how hard I can push it. I decided to start off on the bike. 5 miles sounded like a good place to start. A fairly quick bike ride from my house to Cottonmill, a local lake on the edge of town, did the trick. It was fairly uneventful, and I was doing okay the next morning.

With day 1 over with no major problems, it was time to try jogging. I decided to see what would happen with a brisk 3-mile jog. I had to stop jogging and do some mall-walking on several occasions. I remember when I weighed 165 lbs and I could run without stopping for 10 miles, and only stopping then out of boredom. Those days are over. I am hauling an extra 75 lbs down the road now, and 27 is a lot different than 17 was anyway. My body may be complaining, but my mind is still sharp enough, and I pushed myself through it. The cumulative effects of the bike ride on day 1, and the jog on day 2 have left me feeling, well, sore.

Sore really doesn’t cover it. I feel like I spent 45 minutes in a tumbler with a load of bricks. The good news is that I don’t feel like I have hit the upper limit of what I can handle physically yet. I feel sore, but I don’t feel like I have risked injury yet. I want to approach that line carefully though. Nothing puts the kibosh on a new exercise routine like an early injury.