The rematch

Today was the rematch.

In the Davenport West pool, lane 1, couched and ready was Wolf, my son. I was in lane 2.

We launched, the torpedo and the battleship, neck and neck until about midway, when I started pulling ahead, churning four strokes to one breath. I glided to an easy win.

A victory for old guys everywhere.

I told Wolf how I did it and probably should have left the pool, retired in the glow of victory.

I didn’t. And this race, Wolf was waiting for me at the end.

Trying to salve my ego, he said, ” We can call it a tie. You were winded from our first race.”

Counting down from 288.2, again

I woke up and weighed myself today for the first time in weeks.

“Just don’t be above 290,” I said toward the scale, which by the way, was a gift from my family years ago. That came about from prodding by me. I’ve always been someone looking to that next tool — a fix-it that will finally work. At that time it was a scale and a notebook. See progress, make progress , right?

The scale read 288.2.

Relief, but not much.

The lowest weight I’ve reached in 5 years has been 273. The first time was in Idaho when I would take my kids, ages 4-6, to the school field down the street and would run through football training drills — sprints, burpees, those those types of things. I set weight-loss goals with prizes attached. I was getting close to earning a Captain America T-shirt.

To this day, I have not watched the last 2 seasons of the remade “Battlestar Galactica” because I haven’t reached 260. (I think that was the goal.)

I ballooned back up after moving to Iowa. Some of that is just water weight moving from a relatively dry area to the Midwest, I told myself. Had I gone to the Pacific Northwest, I was sure to be 350 pounds. Right?

Yeah, I know. It doesn’t work like that.

I also know what the real problem is. Despite my on-again-off-again exercising — most of which is jogging, something I surprise myself by enjoying — I eat lousy. I am responsible for McDonald’s profits despite the recession. I am the leading predator of gummi bears. And remember the news a while back about a chocolate shortage? It actually had nothing to do with bad bean harvests. It was me. Sorry.
I’m one of those people you might have heard about that eats to deal with stress. If you see me make a lot of trips to the communal candy dish at work, that’s an omen.

Knowing is not fixing, however. But, I’m going to try again. I always try again.

So, I put the scale away and dressed to jog the Mississippi River trail. But before I left, I tacked a sheet of paper to my bedroom wall and wrote “1/17 288.2.”

We’ll see how far I get this time.