New Beginnings

Growing up I remember a time when running was fun. In fact, I was good at it. I was taller than most kids, still am, and it gave me a slight advantage during field day. My long legs would carry me around that track at speeds that had me soaring above the clouds. That version of me never lasted. As my home life dramatically changed moving from Tampa to the little town of Milton, FL my body and mind began making dramatic changes as well.

Whether through real or perceived injustice’s to my 9 year old self, I began hating being stuck in a chess match between two parents and eventually bearing burdens a child never wants or should ever have to bear. These changes challenged me and unfortunately I was losing. My physical body made vast changes. My legs begun to lengthen, my arms started stretching across the surface of the land and my body growing disproportionately. Traveling back and forth between families it became a battle of will and I grew so tired and scared that food became my comfort.

Sometimes I can remember coming home from school to eat bean burritos that were roughly 300+ calories and then proceed to eat when my mom made dinner. To this day I don’t know if I ate then to fill a void or if I put myself in a routine that no one ever broke. Like most teenagers, I was stubborn and if someone told me no, they didn’t do it in a way that got through to me.

Heredity and lack of proper nutrition didn’t help these changes growing up, but at some point we have to stop making excuses and make a change. Eventually as I got older and educated in college I began to make those changes. I’m leaving gaps in this story because I hope that later I can continue this story in a way that is meaningful to me and to those that bother to follow me on my journey. I fill you in that I eventually reached over 337 pounds in college. I know that specific number because it was the last time I braved weighing myself when I began a new journey that ultimately helped get me to this point.

I have worked hard to lose and now gain my way to get back to an unhealthy 268 pounds, but this is where I begin a new adventure in my life. Next year I turn 30 years old and I don’t want to live this way anymore. I’m tired of complacency, excuses, and the weight of the world that I have carried on my shoulders mentally, and now physically around my waist. Over the next year I plan to try to write as much as possible talking about bits of my past, present and future. I am looking forward to beginning training towards competing in my first triathlon next year in the fall. More importantly I look forward to the physical and mental transformation I hope to begin. I thank you for being here as I start my journey and hope to see you at the finish line.

It was a dark and stormy night...

It was a dark and stormy night and three bandits sat by the camp fire, one bandit says to the next, "hey Pedro, tell us a story" so Pedro began. It was a dark and stormy night and three bandits sat by the camp fire, one bandit says to the next, "hey Pedro, tell us a story" so Pedro began. It was a dark and stormy night... Papa always had a story or a joke. That was one of the things that many people loved about him. He had an incredible ability to put a smile on your face even through our darkest of times. Maybe that comes from the time he spent growing up during the great depression. I can recall the numerous stories of how he could go to see a movie for less than 10 cents. Now you can’t go see a movie with out refinancing your house. His experiences have helped to guide all of us in our own journeys in life.

Papa was also an artist. The things he could whittle with wood were amazing. Many of us are lucky to have his pens, purse holders, welsh love spoons, or any other item he created. An unknown individual once said, “Each day is a new canvas to paint upon. Make sure your picture is full of life and happiness, and at the end of the day you don’t look at it and wish you had painted something different.” I think we can all agree that Papa wouldn’t change anything about the way he lived his life. As an artist myself, I look at his life and see a masterpiece. He perfectly weaved compassion with family, love with anger, and humor with life. He was the paint of God’s palette and together they created a beautiful painting.

Lenardo DaVinci once said, "As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death." Papa lived, and I mean truly lived. He spent time in the military, went to college, was an eagle scout, a mason, a shriner, a clown, a son, husband, father, grand father, great grandfather, and a friend. Truthfully he was master of all disguises, because he was everything to everyone. He especially meant the world to my Nana, Jean Brimmer. They taught me so much as a loving couple and as parents how to live my life with compassion, truth, humor, and great food. They were to me a perfect example for the foundation of marriage. Maybe through harder times as children they learned the value of what one has and how it can all be quickly taken away.

All of us learned that almost 10 years ago when Nana was quickly taken from us. Papa though heart broken at losing his soul mate persevered and I, like many of us, feel lucky to still have had him for these last several years. He was able to see grandchildren graduate high school, get married, and even saw his great grand children be born into this world. John Chapter 14: verse 27 states, “I am leaving you with a gift—peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give. So don’t be troubled or afraid."

Papa gave all of us the greatest gift of all, time. Time to learn from a man who has experienced many things, whose wisdom goes well beyond the boundaries of life, and who we could share in positives and negatives in our life. He would pick us up when we fell, lend a hand to hold us up when the world was bringing us down, and would lend a shoulder when you needed someone to talk to. Papa is leaving us with the gift of himself, because in reality he never left. He is within each of us as we carry the memories with him, as we carry the wisdom he imparted on to all of us, and as we teach our children the things he taught us. Every time it’s a dark and stormy night I will always think of Pedro sitting around a campfire telling his story and see Papa’s face dimly lit by the creakingly of the lighting as we brace for the storm. Knowing that through any weather I will always be safe because he is there protecting me.

Excuses?!

As a new year begins, we tend to start contemplating the things in life we would like to change about ourselves or our situations. I hear things from wanting to quit smoking, wanting to save more money, wanting to lose weight, etc. All resolutions have great reasoning, but what is sometimes lacking is the resolve for follow through. I, myself, am guilty of making resolutions, but looking back at the end of the year feeling remorse for unsuccessfully fulfilling an obligation I made to myself. That is why I will make a new resolution this year to throw out resolutions and begin making strides to successful goals. Any runner will tell you that they never reached their current pace over night, nor was any Olympian born with 8 gold medals. Success comes with perseverance, practice and more importantly failure.

Failure isn't something to be scared of and in fact can be the fuel we need to achieve our goals. I have failed many of you by not updating my blog over the last few months. My excuses are many and generally center around knee issues that have required me to postpone my marathon, adjusting to parenthood, and work. All of these things are just excuses, walls that I have built up in my mind that have halted me from achieving my goals. My excuses aren't what stops me from achieving my goals, but I am what stops me from achieving my goals. I have failed myself.

This though is not the end. I plan to modify my goals to adapt to my knee injury and find ways to lose weight and continue to take those strides needed to achieve my ultimate goal of running a marathon. Instead of telling myself that I cant run a 5k, I will instead walk one until I can get the strength and endurance to run one. Our excuses are typically mind over matter and what truly matters is the happiness we can feel with achieving our end result. I hope that the New Year brings all of you great peace, prosperity, and happiness. Get out there and try, that is all I can ask and all you owe yourself.

The soothing sounds of a persevering mind

I haven't had the chance to write lately and I find that bothersome, because writing has always been a source of comfort to me. It is one way in which we can keep track of our thoughts and see the misguided steps that sometimes get us to our final destination. There has been numerous times when I may go for a run and veer off the path and find myself in new territory, or where one slight misstep turns into a twisted ankle. That being said I know that for me my mind tends to wander when I run and it allows me to free my mind and think outside of the box. I could go into a psychological rant about how the box doesn't even exist, but I will stick to the story. I'm not one who can run with silence though, not sure if that opens my mind to more thought and it scares me or if to many sounds around me are distracting, but I find it important to run with music. It helps me to keep a good pace while soothing my over active mind to focus on the objective at hand. I tend to come up with my best ideas when I exercise and it kills me that I haven't been able to work out the last two days due to a debilitating stomach virus that has me laid up in bed. The thought of music though sparked an idea that I wanted to get some feedback on. If you had to choose 5 songs that you had to include in an exercise/running play list what would they be. I will actually put these songs into a playlist and talk about how they made me feel later on.

Where is the overweight guy in the workout videos?

For those that have been following along you will know that I recently started doing P90X, the infomercial that tends to play on the hour every hour after midnight, for the last few days. I will be honest and admit that the workout is a bit of a challenge, as it should be, but it is something that I'm starting to believe in without seeing true results after three days. I believe in it because I feel the results after the workout and as my fingers type I can feel it throughout my body. It isn't one of those tremendously painful, body falls apart pains, it is more like a I think I just added 30 years and I need a rocker pains.

Watching the videos had me thinking and as I went for my run this afternoon, which I cut short due to not wanting to overexert myself, I realized that you never see overweight people in so many workout videos, the one exception maybe the Biggest Loser workouts. Still the question is why is it that you never see a celebrity workout guru who actually was the fat kid and continued on as the overweight adult? Is it that we should trust them because they went through college or training and have paid enough to put themselves in that position? What about having the fat person turned thin by listening to what coaches have had to say and sticking with the training?

It just makes me wonder if the reason could be that many of those individuals fell back into their old patterns. If you look at a lot of the Biggest Loser contestants from the past, while they may not be as big as they were on the show, many of them still add on quite a bit of weight. I'm not saying that the Biggest Loser is terrible, because it does what most workout shows don't do and that is to provide hope, while also spending about 30 minutes of the 40 minutes of television they show with commercial products. I actually stopped watching the show because I couldn't afford to keep buying more Brita pitchers.

My point is that maybe having the slightly overweight guy on these shows might show people like me or someone else reading this that is having a hard time realize they aren't the only ones. No matter who you are or what fitness level you may be at, there is someone like you struggling to improve. It isn't about where you start, but the journey you take to reach your destination.

Warning... Fat guy suit ahead

I hate to admit it, but that fat, chubby cheeked, groundhog faced, jolly green giant is me. This photo was taken back in 2003 close to the height of my weight. I had over the years grown into my 6'6" 337+ lb frame. I actually have to add the plus sign because I eventually gave up weighing myself out of sheer embarrassment to the scale. I think it eventually started to feel bad it had to have such a high amount, and I unfortunately kept egging it on. My diet consisted of McDonald's double cheese burgers (usually 2 at a time), copious amounts of fat food, and well actually anything I could fit my hands on and devour. My weakness was always the Chinese buffets. In fact, I remember growing up and going to Nim's Garden in Milton and eating at least 2-3 plates of just fried rice. You would have thought I was training to be a sumo wrestler or at least a linebacker, but no just training to get fat. Well I got fat and then some, but that was only part of the story. Food has always been an excuse for me, even after getting to this point in my life food is still a great comforter. I think that will always be a problem for me, but hopefully something I can eventually conquer or subdue.

Most of my life, at least the teenage years, was a nightmare for me. I was so awkward that I gave awkward a bad reputation. I remember asking out girls in the hope of finding someone who thought I was attractive, but that never happened until I was almost out of high school. At some point I started to get confidence in myself, but while in high school it was pretty limited to my senior year, and by that point it was more of a feeling that I was almost graduating and I was owed some street credit. Eventually I graduated high school and began a journey that would forever change my life.

College was a total experience that I never expected. I could write a lot about it, but I will stick to the story. I had my first true love at the end of my freshman year of college, Lindsay W. I felt on top of the world, but that could have been that it was the first person to show love back and it made me feel that somehow I was experiencing love. I remember and this should have been a foreshadow to the future, but she told me 3 months into dating, late one evening, that I was too fat for her. Wow, I mean I know people have said things in the past, like in the middle school when Alicia Hefty told me I had cankles, or others poked fun at my weight, but this hurt. Did I do anything about it, no. In fact I think I may have lost a small amount of weight and then gained it back only to try and lose it again, but this time without support from the person who told me I was fat in the first place.

Then it happened, one year and six months later she broke the news that she couldn't be with me anymore and it seemed weight had to play a part. I cried, not going to lie, for quite some time. Then the strangest thing happened, I woke up early one morning looked at myself in the mirror and actually admitted to myself that I hated what I saw. I didn't feel bad about saying that, in fact it inspired me to change. I went out to the track that day to begin running, well maybe more like a slow jog with the hopes that if you filmed it, sped it up times 100 I would look like I was at least doing a 10 minute mile. I couldn't even finish one lap around the track without feeling like I was going to have a cardiac arrest. The next day I went out and jogged and went a little further and then again the same thing the next day till I had run a whole mile at the end of one week.

From that moment on I was either running, working out, going to class, working, or doing one of the million activities I got involved with on campus. You see I don't hate the path I was on, because it helped me to get to the destination I have arrived at today. I've lost over 100 lbs, only to gain some back and then lose some again, and then gain it back and repeat the cycle. Weight lose isn't easy. I would attribute it to something like smoking where you can't just do it cold turkey unless you happen to be one of the lucky ones. You have to keep trying no matter how much of a fool you end up looking, because eventually one day you will reach your goal.

I haven't reached my goal, obviously had I done that my story would look a little different. My hope is to eventually be under 200 lbs, though my mom thinks I will be a twig. I have come to think that as long as I am healthy and happy I don't care how much I weigh. What I do care about is setting individual goals, such as running a half marathon to help take steps to overcoming my past, strides to help keep me present, and a pace that moves me towards a future that sees my daughter grow up with a father.

The Beginning

I won't begin to get to deep as this is my first entry into blogging and I want to take some time out to start by introducing myself and the type of direction I see this blog taking as I begin my blogging journey. My name is Robbie Leggett as you may already know and a few things you should know about me are that I'm passionate, dedicated, eccentric and an advocate. The list goes on and over time you will learn more, but I just wanted to give you a taste. You don't pour the entire bottle of Jack Daniels down your throat all at once, you savor the flavor and then begin the journey to passing out. I think that will be a fitting metaphor for me as this blog is the beginning of my journey to running a half marathon. I will begin by running slowly and learn to trust my body and my knees, before I try to take on such a monstrous task as running 13.1 miles. By the time I reach the finish line I might actually pass out, either from sure joy or pure exhaustion.

My goal is to help raise money for my sister who was recently diagnosed with cancer and might have been lucky enough to have it removed in surgery, but as anyone knows with a procedure such as this it cost a lot of money. That is why I want to help her out so she doesn't have to carry the burden alone. After we have reached enough money to pay her medical bills off if we reach that magic number the rest will go to the American Cancer Society.

So now you know a little bit about me and why I'm doing this and over the course of the next few months leading up to the run on November 14th I plan to dive into the random thoughts running makes me come up with and hopefully find my own path to the finish line.