As faithful followers of this blog know, exactly one month ago, August 1, 2018, Great Big Fat Guy underwent surgery during which his right kidney and a huge cancerous tumor were removed from his body. Today, Great Big Fat Guy went for a walk which lasted exactly 30 minutes and covered 1.6 miles.
I (also known as Great Big Fat Guy, also know as The Wrong Monkey, also known as Steven Bollinger) was planning to take a route which covers 2.1 miles, but a little past the 1 mile mark, I was feeling exhausted and decided to take a short cut home. There was one steep hill on the route, by Ann Arbor standards. (By Knoxville, Tennessee standards, there were no steep hills on the route.) (The distances were calculated with Google Maps.)
I tend to write these Great Big Fat Guy posts right after doing some cardio, so maybe they're 100% written under the euphoric influence of endorphins. However, right now, there's one big buzzkill that's cutting right through the euphoria: before the surgery, I weighed 320 pounds. That's too much for me. There may be some guys who stand 6'3" and are actually so full of muscles that they weigh 320 pounds and are not fat, but I can't kid myself into thinking that I'm one of those guys. 220 pounds would be much more like it, and 180 would probably be better than 220.
I hadn't been weighed in 2 years (which is a very convenient sort of thing if you'd rather be in denial about what kind of physical shape you're in), because I hadn't been to see a doctor in 2 years, and my house is tilted so a scale isn't accurate inside it. I used to walk to the hospital just to weigh myself, which is about 2.5 miles each way, 5 miles round trip, and when I did that, I weighed a lot less than 320 pounds, and it wasn't a coincidence. When I weighed 180 or less, I often walked more than 30 miles in a day -- are you starting to see the pattern here?
Time for Great Big Fat Guy to spend a lot of time being Great Big Sweaty Guy. I want to start a new series of blog posts replacing the Great Big Fat Guy posts, with titles like Big Tall Guy, Not Particularly Fat, Day 45, or Slender Guy Breaks 20 Minute Barrier in 5K.
PS, 2 September 2018: One day later. Same 1.6-mile course. 30 seconds faster: 29 min 30 sec. Just like yesterday, I left home intending to walking the entire 2.1-mile course. Just like yesterday, I chickened out and took the shortcut home. Unlike yesterday, today it was cloudy for much of the walk, making it much cooler and easier. I thought I was going to beat yesterday's time by more than 30 seconds. Oh well. At least I actually got out and walked two whole days in a row.
One more piece of advice. Try to walk in the AM between 8 and 10, and allow natural light to enter your eyes (not advocating staring at the sun, of course). This is to allow red light frequencies in sunlight to help balance out the overexposure we computer addicts get to the blue light of "screens". The latter is cellularly toxic, the former beneficial.
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