February 2013: First time, fat runner.

I'm fat ya'll.   Always have been.  Well, since the age of 5 when I started sneaking spoonfuls of Miracle Whip and hiding in the closet to eat it.  Makes me gag a little to think of doing that now, but I digress. Though heavy (which is the term I like better than fat), I was always somewhat active.    Hiking, biking, the occasional dance class, flag football (playing the line of course, so I could flatten all the skinny fast girls with my sheer brute size), summer softball, canoeing, walking. I figured I would make a good athlete, but was always thinking I was too fat to try it out in earnest.  So as the years passed, I went from thinking I could be sporty, to in actuality being a 280lb binge eating mess.  Once, at the bottom of a pound bag of plain M&M's, I realized I needed to change.  And then later that same day, 3 Dr. Peppers and a whole bag of chips later, that no, really, I needed to change or they wouldn't be able to find a coffin big enough to shove my dead fat ass into.  Morbid, I know, but imminently true.  So over the next eight years, I took a hard, honest look at what made me eat, what made me unhappy, what made me hate myself, what made my body feel bad, and started to slowly change it, heal it, and love it.  During this time, the little healthy skinny me that lived inside of all this other mess, kept saying she wanted to run a marathon.  Fat me laughed and laughed, but secretly wanted to, too.

Me, at my heaviest, 280lbs, circa 2006.

So I find myself now, on the brink of my 40th birthday, training for a half marathon.  My eight years of healing has led me to a 60 pound weight loss, but I have at least 60 more to go.  I was inspired to begin this journey, when I saw a woman on FB who was challenging herself to her first marathon while raising money for an awesome animal rescue group, Running for Rescues.  I'll post about R4R in an upcoming post.  But this was my sign that it was now my time.  So I set a date to start training.  February 13, 2013.  My plan:  Train for a 5K, then a 10k, then the 1/2 marathon.  I weighed 234lbs.   Now I just needed some shoes!

Feb. 12, 2013 - The day before my first run.