MY HISTORY

My name is Dave and I am overweight....they say admission is the first step.

Quick travel back to the 1980’s I was 119 waist and strange enough 87 kg’s, I remember this from my military service as my “browns” pants was size 119. So yeah young guy whole life ahead of him, invincible of course, you are always invincible when you are young.

I smoked two packs of 20’s a day, always Texan either filter or plain, on the bad end of the month before pay day days  I would smoke whatever was donated.  I left the army and started to work, got married blah blah fast forward to 03/03/1999 where by now I was up to nearly 60 smokes a day, that day I stopped smoking cold turkey as they say and that was the start of my problems.

I have always had an appetite for the fast foods, Steers, KFC, Wimpy, McDonalds etc and in the kind of job I was in sometimes those where the only places open to have “lunch”  yeah lunch on nightshift is 01h00 in the morning.  So anyway as life is you don’t notice stuff until someone grabs you and shakes you  and says look at this, I mean the bathroom scale had a stupid err message, if something didn’t fit I just bought the next size up .....

Rock on 2001, two years no smokes, yeah, so on this day in march I was sitting in the office doing some admin work when all of a sudden I felt some very bad chest pains, I knew this was not good so I tore off to my Doctor. He did several tests, examined the results and frowned than looked up from the file, and this I will never forget, he said “Dave there is nothing I can do for you, you are a walking dead man”

Bloody hell, WTF, I asked him what he meant by that I mean hell you are my doctor you need to fix the problem. He told me that the only help I could get was myself, I had to change my eating habits, I had to exercise or I am going to die.  Wow sobering thought. I got on their scale at the doctors rooms and yup err.   

They did a blood sample which was sent off to the lab and I would have to wait for that result but in the mean time I had to change my eating habits ok my wife can help there, exercise well now what to do, the doctor suggested running, I was not a runner at all though my life so this was a very unknown area but yes I agreed and the very next day I started to run....well tried at least.  Like that movie Run Fat Boy Run, his first run was very much the same a few minutes and I thought I was so great.

So this scale thing had me going and I wanted to know who much I weighed, well I had a friend who owned a scrap dealer and he offered to help with the err damn thing. I used the scale the use to weigh the metal and well very sobering depressing minute in my life....200 kgs holly MOG what the hell had I done to myself. 5xl shirts, size 60 trousers.

So my course was set I knew what I had to do and then the call from the doctor “Come and see me “   Oh crap what now, well this would be the lowest point I could go, cholesterol count 11.3 normal human is 4.0 straight onto chronic medication of Lipitor. 

So fast forward to 2010, weight  119 kgs, cholesterol 4.4 I had done it......amazing time of my life but alas things were about to change. 

I ran a 100 miler and 2211 km race as well as the Comrades Marathon in 2010, feeling on top of the world I decided to take a small break from running as I had put in a few thousand kilometres and it just was time to hold up for a while.

211km in 39 hours

Just when I was getting ready to start running again I was involved in bad motor vehicle accident resulting in neck injuries and it took quite a while before I got the all clear to return to running, well I had been training for a week when the most scarcest time of my life came about, I really believed that I was going to die that day. Somehow I didn’t but I didn’t walk away in one piece.

We were out in Inanda which is a black township west of Durban, the people there got all rowdy about our presence and one thing lead to another and all of a sudden we were being shot  at and stoned, not little stones, damn rocks bigger than my two fists, I was hit about 8 times resulting in some nasty injuries, the worst being when I fell I tried to steady myself by grabbing onto a wall as I fell really stupid as this crushed my tendons in my shoulder against the collar bone acromion in the area of the bursa which supposed to protect these tendons .

After numerous failed doctors treatments I turned to a Chinese Doctor who actually got my shoulder fixed but I had paid very dearly for all this, not being able to exercise and sometimes being depressed I fell back to the comfort of eating , fast foward to today 01/01/2013.

Ran my first 4 km for 2013, weight 163.9......it starts (again)