I’ll share with you something that I personally was incredibly proud of – I have already detailed my weight and weightloss battles. I don’t know who owns the rights to it now – back when I did it – it was the BRW Corporate Triathlon (400m swim, 10k bike ride, 5k run). I thought I trained my arse off for this… yeah well… maybe not! I spent about 3 months training for this but my main focus was still on weights and I learnt that muscle fitness does not equate to cardio fitness. Something a lot of guys in prison I found weren’t aware of… anyway. I had also stopped drinking, smoking and switched to a vegetarian diet – I was obessed!
So I would go for a swim in the morning before work, it’s funny as a child I was a great swimmer, as an adult I wasn’t and I found myself struggling/floundering… I’d walk to work (probably should have jogged) and I’d go to the gym after work – do my weights and finish with a 5km run which would completely knacker me. I don’t like running never have. Regardless of the amount of sneakers I own (20 at last count) I don’t run, I sprint which for distance events is really hard. I would get home and I would jump on my bike and ride what I thought was about 10ks.
So I did this for about 3 months – I was also a vegetarian at this time. I looked great, I felt great and I thought I could meet the challenge. Prove to myself that I could do it and hopefully shut the fat me up for a while…
This is where it gets funny. So the night before I am trying to fit my bike into the back of my car… a 1986 Honda Prelude… 2 hours, a hell of a lot of swearing and I got the bike in… I considered that a massive achievement – even though I could have cried so many times! The rational practical 20/20 hindsight equipped part of me should have realised that I should have done a trail run of trying to fit my bike in the car – I should have! I really fucking should have…
So I get up at some ungodly hour to drive down to the Gold Coast for the triathlon… all sweet, find a parking spot, spend a good 15 minutes pulling my bike out of the car. Lesson here – car may look pretty, functionality is shit. So I then found out I managed to bend the handlebars either at some point the night before or that morning. So my bike kept pulling to the left… it made for an interesting 10k ride. I don’t like running – I never have – I honestly thought that the 5k was manageable – HA! I wasn’t expecting that about a fair bit of the run would be on sand… so what does Michael do? Powerwalks the last bits of the run – some would say powermince, hey I got there in the end!
I managed to do it in under 1 hour which I was quite proud of myself for – I will be honest and say I had no idea of what to expect. I also made the rookie mistake of not doing a practice run of the triathlon so I wasn’t expecting how tiring it was going to be. Mind you I set out to do something and I achieved it, which until that point in my life I had never done – yay me!
A couple of funny things – when I was leaving, I was walking back to my car and there was an industrial bin – I threw my bike away… I wasn’t going to spend hours struggling to get the damn thing back in my car. One of the girls I worked with was absolutely dumbfounded and also by my attitude of, I didn’t pay much for it anyway, I did explain the length of time it took to get it in my car. When she saw the Prelude – she got it!
One other thing I forgot to do was stretch when I finished the triathlon, I spent a few hours afterwards just standing around watching, chatting and so on. It took me about 90 minutes to drive home… I went to get out of my car at home and I crumpled as my legs had seized up… I rang my flatmate to see if he was home and he was at work. I lay next to my car for a couple of minutes trying to get my legs to work… I managed to eventually get upstairs to the apartment and I would say all was hunky-dory which it kind of was. I decided to celebrate with a six pack of beer and a meatlovers pizza with extra bacon. The only thing I really missed during my whole vego period was bacon!
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