At one time, I ran a blog called Fitterverse: A universe of fitness. One of my favorite features of that blog was an interview series I did with a variety of people at different stages in their fitness journey. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I’ve been able to recapture the text of those interviews. I’ve published them here on their original publication dates.
Scott T is a 60-something IT professional from Atlanta. Scott and I met at a north Atlanta restaurant for his interview.
FV: Scott, what made you start your fitness program?
ST: There were several triggers. It was always something I wanted to do, but I was preoccupied with business and career. I made lots of excuses, but I never really wanted to be unhealthy. I had trouble finding the time to get healthy. Then several things happened together that really motivated me and made it possible – a perfect storm, of sorts.
One of my obstacles was a pair of foot conditions. Initially I was diagnosed with a Morton’s neuroma that made exercise and even walking very painful. The neuroma was surgically removed in 2004, but that didn’t cause the pain to go away – it actually got worse, and eventually just wearing shoes was painful.
I went back to the doctor who removed the neuroma and told him “This is still hurting.” We tried orthotics, stretching and stuff but none of it helped. I tried just living with it. I stopped exercising altogether. I tried another doctor who had no clue what it was, and was pretty much a jerk to boot. It got so it hurt so bad that when I took a shower, water falling on my foot felt like an ice pick sticking in my toe.
Finally, I went back to the first doc who had removed the neuroma five years earlier. He was sympathetic and concerned it hadn’t improved. So he looks at it some more, pokes at it, scratches his head and says “If this is what I think it is, we studied them in med school, but I’ve never seen one in real life. Nobody in this practice has.” It’s not like this guy is fresh out of school. He’s in his mid-fifties.
The culprit was a glomus tumor the size of a chickpea in the tip of the toe next to my little toe. Such tumors are usually benign, and mine was, thank God. One reason he’d never seen one before was that they usually occur in fingers, not toes. It was like a miracle cure after he removed the tumor. I could finally wear shoes, walk, and even exercise without that stabbing pain.
Coincidentally, a couple months before the surgery I put an old picture of my wife, kids, and me from the late 80s on my desk – a picture of a skinny me. A co-worker walked by, saw the picture and said “Who is that?” I said “That’s me and the family.” He said “Get outta here! I’ve gotta take that home and show it to my wife. She’s never going to believe this!” That was kind of a wake-up call. I had several similar wake-up calls that motivated me to finally get around to it.
My job also was in kind of a holding pattern while my employer re-invented itself, and that gave me the time to focus on getting fit. So I had no work pressure. I had the time, I had the motivation, and I was physically able. I said “If I do nothing else this year, I’m going to get fit.”
FV: What goals did you have going into that?
ST: I went and saw my GP about two weeks after surgery, and he wrote me a prescription for statins. I said “How about if I lose 60 pounds instead?” He laughed, rolled his eyes and said “Try losing 20 pounds first.” He had me coming back in four months. So I took that as a “throw down the glove” challenge.I also had another friend who wasn’t extremely healthy, but he’d run some half marathons – not particularly fast – but he ran them. He said to me “If you ever see the south side of 220, you’ll probably kiss the ground.” Another gauntlet thrown. So I said “Okay, damn it, I’m going to do it.” Kind of like in the Rocky movies, where Rocky has to get mad, about to lose it all, and up against the ropes in order to dig deep and win. I got really mad at myself and motivated to get fit or die trying.
My initial goal was to lose 60 pounds. That would get me to a weight where I wasn’t really fit, but wasn’t really fat either. Somewhere along the way I discovered body fat and BMI, so I set a goal that I was going to hit the middle of BMI normal for my height, which was 148 – about 90 pounds lighter than I was at the time. I also wanted to run the Peachtree in 2010, and get my waist to a 34. I was wearing a 40, and they were tight as hell.
FV: Did you hit 148? I can’t imagine you that thin. What are you at now?
ST: No, I never hit 148. That would have required losing over a third of my body weight, and wouldn’t have been healthy for my frame. I’m at 179 right now. For BMI normal I had to get under 175. Technically by BMI, I’m overweight now. But those were my ambitious goals, and they were daunting.
I had read you should only lose 1-2 pounds per week. So I picked a date and target weight, plugged that, the current date and my weight into Excel, plotted one-pound and two-pound trend lines, and just tried to get in between them. I heard you shouldn’t plot stuff, and you shouldn’t weigh yourself daily, but that’s what worked for me. What that did was keep me on track, because I could see the long term goal in advance. I was still fat as a pig, but I was on schedule. That gave me the resolve to go to bed not necessarily starving or hungry, but NOT FULL. When I’d go out to eat, I’d eat the hamburger without the bun. I’d skip the french fries and get steamed vegetables. I started to look forward to my daily weigh-in, my little micro-reward or deal with my disappointment. It was a motivator.
I started going to the gym, and started doing a lot of low impact stuff because my joints hurt, and I still wasn’t confident that I could run without my toe hurting. I was going four to six times a week.
I found an app called LoseIt which has a lot of calorie information so you can look up foods from any chain restaurant, from the grocery store. You can put in your own recipes. It makes it a lot easier to do calorie counting. Also with gym equipment, it will tell you how many calories you burned. It will basically give you a budget.
I think a lot of it is focus. With the daily weigh-in, every time my hand moved toward my mouth I was thinking about consequences. The constant daily concentration on it kept me focused on it every god-damned meal of the day. The reward was that for the most part, I stayed within the lines.
I went back to the doctor after four months. His eyes got big, a little bit. He said “I think we can take you off the blood pressure medicine. We can try this.” I had a blood pressure machine at home, and my blood pressure didn’t go up. He didn’t try to force cholesterol medication on me. The other thing he did was, when I told him about my goal of 148, he said “That’s a little light.” According to his calculations my ideal weight was 166, which was within BMI normal, but just on the higher end. So he talked me into a more reasonable goal.
By the fall, I was below 200. People were stopping me in the hall and saying “Wow!” One of the funnier things that happened was that a company security guard who’d known me for years stopped me and said “Sir… sir! You need a badge!” I’d friend someone on Facebook I hadn’t seen in years and they’d say things like “OMG, whose body did you steal?” or “Are you okay now? So sorry you had cancer.” Comments and reactions like that were very rewarding and kept me motivated.
After seven months, I weighed 190-something and saw there was a 5k race up at Berry College, so I signed up for that. There was a 5k, a 10k, and a half marathon all the same day. I did the wimpy little 5k. I was breathing pretty hard, but damn! I ran a 5k and I hurt for several days after. I remember some serious runners who did the half-marathon who made some offhand remarks, like “How was the 5k?” It was more their tone, I could hear a little derision in there. It was a good start, but not enough and the other runners’ attitudes just motivated me more. Another gauntlet thrown down.
FV: So what do you do today for workouts?
ST: Right now it’s primarily running. If the weather’s bad I’ll hit the treadmill or the elliptical. It’s mainly cardio. I need to get back into more strength training. One of the things I have some problem with is core strength, I’m having some hip flexor issues. I don’t know if you saw on Facebook, but I signed up for the New York Marathon with Team in Training. They had 200 slots to get into New York. So that’s like 16 weeks away. I’m running three times a week, and I need to ramp that up.
FV: Now this isn’t your first marathon, is it?
No. One of the things that I’ve found is that now that I’ve hit a goal, it’s hard to keep up the motivation, which is why I started doing the races and marathons. I hit the Peachtree goal, and got a good “after” picture at about 180. I eventually got down around 167, 13% body fat, though I’m not that now. Then I decided I wanted to run a half-marathon every year on Thanksgiving Day. I ended up running three of the in the fall of 2010 in about 6 weeks. The second one I did I ran in my hometown that I grew up in. The marathon ran through the neighborhood I lived in. It almost ran by my house. It ran by the bus stop I stood at, the church I went to, my elementary school, the state fairgrounds. It was a total memory lane. On top of that I cut 25 minutes off my previous half marathon. Talk about runner’s high! I was dancing! I decided I was going to run a marathon, so I signed up for the Publix marathon with Team in Training.
Someone told me that running a marathon isn’t twice as hard as running a half marathon, it’s more like three times. I discovered it’s more like five or six times. I got to mile 24 and I thought I was going to die. But I did it. I walked mile 25 and 26, got to mile 26, and the coach of the Atlanta chapter, whose daughter died of leukemia in her early 20s, is standing there. I could not walk past that man, so I ran.
After I did that I said I’ll never do that again. Two days later I signed up for Savannah with Team in Training again. I cut a little over an hour off of my previous event. That’s still my PR, a 4:35:37. After that, I thought running the Boston Marathon might really be possible and made that my goal. To get an entry for Boston in 2013, a man my age had to run a sub 3:55:00. Even with my Savannah success, that was an ambitious goal. So I got a coach and signed up for New Orleans in 2012.
In training for New Orleans I managed to do a half marathon in under two hours, which was basically very close to the pace I needed for Boston, but I needed that pace for a full marathon, not a mere half! Just weeks before New Orleans I developed plantar fasciitis. That, a hot day and a really crowded start kept me from getting my BQ in New Orleans. I had some very aggressive goals. I missed the goals, and by mile 6 I knew I was not going to hit my goal. The motivation just went out of me. I had another 20 freakin’ miles ahead of me. That was very difficult.
I signed up for another marathon in November 2012 with a huge amount of downhill in the mountains of North Carolina, and capped at only 300 runners. New Orleans was so crowded at the start that I couldn’t get through all the people. I decided “I’m gonna fix that. 300 runners!” It runs down forest roads and has a net 3,000 foot drop. I thought it would be easy.
It turned out the roads were uneven, rocky and rutted. There was a 3,000 foot drop, but there was at least 500 or 1,000 feet of gain in there. I was pushing the time and ran too fast, which is a mistake in marathon running. I overhydrated, and ended up running that in over 5 hours. I discovered that no marathon is easy.
Then out of the blue I got the opportunity to run Boston through my employer, and then the damned Tsarnaev brothers screwed that up. I ran 24.8 miles before I ran into the police roadblock. And strangely, I didn’t hit the wall in Boston. I’d heard about the bombs around mile 22, but I kept running. I wasn’t thinking about the wall, I was thinking about everything else in the world but the wall. There’s a huge Citgo sign near the stadium. When you see the Citgo sign, you’re gonna make it, and I could see the sign. Then there was the barricade, and we had to stand around for three or four hours before I could get back to the hotel and my family.
FV: Do you have any advice for someone who wants to start something like what you’ve done?
ST: It’s not really rocket science – eat right and exercise. Find a way to be motivated. Don’t set unrealistic goals. Don’t get discouraged. It takes some time.
Look at your life. Look at how you feel, look at other people your size. There’s kind of a line between setting an ambitious goal and setting unrealistic goals that will only set you up for failure. You want to set a stretch goal, but don’t kill yourself if you don’t quite meet it. I’ve never lost sleep that I’ve never hit 148.