This is the first entry for my road to 210 pounds. This will be a very honest documentation of what I'm going through on as regular a basis as I can manage.
At this time I weigh 351.5 pounds. I started at 372 pounds a little over a month ago. I've been going to Goodlife Fitness with my brother, Jason, and it has been...adventurous.
During my six-session opening package I had a personal trainer named Anthony, who plays CFL-style football for the Windsor Fratmen. I know that the pain that people experience while working out under a trainer isn't personal, but that's difficult to believe, at times.
When Jay and I got home from workouts I would do a zombie-walk over to my room and collapse into bed. I don't have any medical records or anything to back me up, but I'm pretty damn sure that the unconsciousness I would experience at these times is a micro-coma. I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure that's the actual, medical term for what I was going through. After the coma wore off, I would wake up to find out it was night time. I would drag my legs on, zombie walk to the kitchen, prepare a variation on my beans-and-rice special, eat and go back to bed. My intention was to watch some TV shows or a movie, but when I got back into bed the only thing that made any sense was to go back to sleep.
This went on for a couple weeks. Then a transformation occurred; my "naps" went from four or so hours to 45 minutes. It is currently like a reeeeeally long egg timer goes off and my body is convinced that it's time to get up and go. I believe my body needs a talking-to.
My current trainer is a delightful lady who is originally from Serbia. Her being in Canada can be one of only two possibilities. The first one is that she was sent here to sew dissension among the citizens of this polite national community which will make it ripe for plucking in probably another decade. This is Serbia playing the long con. The only other possibility, and the more likely of the two in my opinion, is that she was kicked out of Serbia because her training techniques caused so much ongoing pain to her clients that they exported her.
Mira Ivanovich. She is very fair-skinned with black hair. She has the body of what appears to be the generic perfection trainers at Goodlife have, but her bottom is more full than the other ladies. I thought it was because she had a healthy amount of body fat stored there, but the other day she told me to look at her butt while she was demonstrating an exercise AND THE WHOLE THING FLEXED. I'm not even kidding. I poked her in the abs once and my finger is still healing from the encounter. At one point she took my hands to help me get up from a bench and she said, "oh, you have such soft hands". Anyone who knows me knows that this is bullshit. I asked to take a moment to feel her hands and it turns out that the traditional Serbian method of washing hands involves brillo pads and some variety of weak acid, probably straight lye. So, not so perfect. Ha HA!
Being that I'm Dave Russell, I'm always trying to make her and the other people there laugh. This isn't all that hard for most of them, but Mira has only been in Canada for fifteen years, which, apparently, isn't long enough to pick up on the subtle nuances of Canadian humour. I'm trying to learn Serbian from her but she mumbles a great deal, so this means either Serbian is actually just a bunch of mumbling, or she isn't very good at speaking Serbian, either. Oh, her first language, by the way, is pain and she, in that respect, is a blabbermouth. I now have fond memories of my days of the more pedestrian pain I experienced with Anthony.
Mira has a ball that she had some other physio name for, but which we now call her painball. You can tell it's hers because, firstly, it hurts just to look at it, like staring into the countenance of some Lovecraftian nether-god, and her name is written on it. For a couple weeks I assumed that this was used, simply, for some torture technique she'd worked for years to fine tune, but it turns out that it's also to help to loosen up something called fascia. She insists that it's this fibrous membrane that runs through and around muscles, veins and all sorts of stuff. She says that I have scarred fascia all around my shoulders and that it needs to be loosened if I want to have big shoulders. Now, I have never said that I wanted big shoulders. Using public transit is hard enough as it is. I only go on the train if I'm going with someone small that I know.
There is another trick she had up her sleeve that she pulled out last week. She *called* it a massage, but I didn't feel awesome when she was done, nor did I love her, which was what she assured me would happen. When I got home I passed out and when I woke up I was depressed. Now, I say "depressed", but that doesn't come close to the soul crushing, intensely emotional weekend I had to endure following her ministrations. When I told her about this on the following Monday, she started apologizing and hasn't stopped. The thing is, though, I think these massages will help me to quit smoking. What I'm guessing happened is that a whole pile of toxins were released and if I had drunk more water I would have washed more of them out and wouldn't have had such a difficult time in the wake of her efforts. So, I'll be asking for another of these massages but this time I'll be prepared for the ensuing shitstorm. She has also said that if I get really down, that I can call her and that we'd cry together, so, win-win.
That's it for this entry.
I'll be trying to do an update at least after every visit to the gym, which means that this will be lengthy before long.
Much care.
-Dave :)
