A helper of mine collected some interviews for me a couple of weeks ago.  This is Jimmy, addict of half marathons!

I have hit a major road bump in my prep to my first marathon. I’d love to get as much input as I can. What do you think?

Nutrition

I need some suggestions for what to do.  At mile marker 10, I felt like I ran out of energy, and I still had 5 miles to go!  What do you do?  What do you recommend? Energy bars, energy drinks, etc … What is working for you?

Question:

What does it take to get you off the couch and to the gym on a tough day?

Making Smarter Choices

So there’s a pizza party at work.  Hey, you worked hard to earn that pizza too, and you’d kill for a slice, right?  Instead of just eating salad and watching everyone else enjoy, fill your plate with half salad and a slice of pizza.  This will keep you from overdoing it later and you’ll feel satisfied.

How do you finish strong?

When I’m really feeling it towards the end of a workout, these extra motivators help me glide though:

1. Have an “I CAN DO THIS” playlist: when the juices are getting low, listening to motivating tunes.
2. If you’re running / walking in public place, pick someone else exercising and try to keep their pace.
3. Imagine the finish line: visualize the prize.  Think of where you want to be.  For me it’s the finish line at my marathon, therefore, I visualize myself coming through at The Flying Pig.  It works every time!

What about you?

Treadmill Tip

Got this from my gym’s Facebook wall this morning:

Tilt a Tad: Stand tall as you run, but deliberately lean your whole body slightly forward from the ankles. This slant in your stance allows gravity to propel you ahead with each step. It helps increase your speed with minimal effort so you can tirelessly torch more calories.

There I am standing at the finish swine with my bottled water right after I completed the flying pig 1/2 marathon.

Wow is an understatement on how I feel.

I was the the poster boy when I was in the Navy. Fat, never me. Fat people don’t care. Fat people are lazy. Fat people are … STOP!!!

Fat people are just people like I was that got there by accident and saw no way out so we punished ourselves by eating and eating to eat. 

There will be a moment when we do have to stop the pity party and “get’r done”. There were hundreds of signs being played in my path, all saying “this does not have to be your life.”  Finally, I had enough.

How bad did it get?

I ate so much food that people would buy me lunch just to watch me eat it all. My wife would make me dinner and say “eat quick because we are going over to a friend’s house for dinner.” She would get so embarrassed from the food I could eat that she feed me before we went to eat at a friend’s house. The weird thing was that I got away with it for years without gaining an ounce of weight.

Eventually, the free ride came to a screeching halt. I started gaining excessive weight and people who knew me as a “ripped” and fit Navy man couldn’t believe my transformation. When I was selling cars, a guy walked up to me and asked for Todd Hudak without even realizing it was me. Todd Hudak, was the poster boy! I went from poster boy to Pillsbury dough boy. Unfortunately I excepted the pain and stayed fat for many years.

Some of the painful things I accepted: 

• I couldn’t walk up a set of stairs without getting out of breath
• All my clothes stopped fitting and 4x was the solution
• My legs would swell up and hurt so bad I wanted to cry
• I hit 300 pounds, kept climbing and really didn’t care
• My wife would tie my shoes for me: I would buy dress shoes and tie them once and never untie them again
• I had to rock back and forth to get out of the chair
• I couldn’t sit at a booth to eat because my stomach pressed on the table
• My kids would ask me to stop killing myself
• I watched the biggest looser while I sat and over ate
• My doctor said enough is enough: My blood sugar level, blood pressure and cholesterol was a serious hazard to my health
• I ate because I was depressed, I ate with the mindset of “how much more damage could I do …”
• I ate to eat and the more people tried to help me, the more I ate
• I was at a buffet in Virginia and after several hours, the manager came up to me and my buddy and gave us our money back and asked us to leave

The final moment came. I heard a statement I will never forget.

When the pain to remain the same becomes greater than the pain to change, we change.

And with that, I changed. 

Last year, I completed the Flying Pig Half Marathon on my quest to lose 100 pounds.  This year, I’m going for the marathon.  Welcome to the journal of my journey.