With A Goal In Sight

For the first time in I don’t know how long, if ever, I actually have a goal that I am working towards and actually have high hopes of accomplishing it!  I honestly don’t know if I have ever set a goal like this and actually believed I would be able to get it done.  I have flippantly set goals and never really followed through on any of them, I never had the confidence that I’d actually get to them.  This time is different, I don’t know why but it feels different.

I can’t believe I am going to admit this here but, I feel like I have to in order to have people understand where I am coming from.  I have been overweight pretty much most of my life.  In Jr. High my mom tried helping me lose a few pounds and it worked for a while, but when I got grounded from going to a school dance because I didn’t lose 5 pounds in a week by my father, I pretty much gave up.  I still tried but I didn’t have the desire anymore.  I have tried other things, other diets over the years and between the things I felt I was giving up and still not having the complete desire to do it, I failed at several attempts.  Three years ago I tried hypnosis to do it and ended up wasting an exorbitant amount of money on it, which I now regret. 

I have been seeing a psychologist for the last 4 years or so and 2 years ago we started to focus on my weight.  He threw a few suggestions at me to try and I did.  I have to admit they were simple and easy to stick to.  It seemed to work, I lost 22 pounds in about 6 months.  I was ecstatic, it had been a long time since I had any success like that, however the success didn’t last long as I started slacking on things and eventually gained half of that 22 pounds back.  It was time to re-focus.

I joined a gym at the end of December last year in an attempt to re-vamp my weight loss goal.  I got back on track with the original plan that had worked before and was now ready to see major results.  Well the results weren’t major, they were almost non-existent.  It was explained to me that I needed to re-focus yet again, but I wasn’t too far off the path at this point.  I needed to have a goal to work towards, something that would make all the time and energy in losing weight worth it.  A Triathlon was suggested, while I didn’t know lots of details, I agreed and even looked them up on line, found one that I thought was reasonable to do and started from there.  However no matter how I tried, I could never get that excited about the triathlon.  I love swimming, but I do not swim like I would need to in order to compete in something like that, I like riding my bike, but was skeptical about doing that along with the swimming and running.  I just plain hate running, always has and probably always will.  That was one part of it I was having trouble getting past.

This coupled with the whole foot injury and setback was not getting me towards my goal.  I decided to do some research online and see what else I found that was just swimming or biking or a combo of both.  I couldn’t find a combo but I did find several bike-a-thons in the near vicinity.  I thought about it for a day and did some more research to find some in the area that were attainable.  Most I had found were happening within a few weeks or month of when I found them; I was in and still am not in any shape to do one yet.  However after searching, I found one in August that made me almost giddy with excitement.  It has a choice of 20 miles, 43 miles or 60 miles.  I already have decided that I am going to aim for the 43 or 63.  I have already worked out a game plan, that I am sure I will revise several times but I am learning that it’s ok to re-organize and re-focus things, especially goals.  If all goes well, I will be pedaling my heart out on Sunday August 10th in Dekalb IL and for the first time, achieving a goal I set for myself. 

Someone once told me that in order to help hold myself accountable, that I needed to tell as many people as I can.  If I tell them, not only will I get their support, I can only hope, but I will also stick to the path towards the goal so that I don’t let everyone down.  Of course the one person I am most worried about letting down is myself, which is why I have worked out a reward for myself if I complete the bike-a-thon, a reward that I hope keeps me focused!!  So not only am I going to be telling my friends and family about doing this bike-a-thon, I have just told anyone and everyone in the world of blogging!!  Hopefully it will give me the kick in the pants I need to stick to and accomplish this goal this time!  This time, this goal is different than any other goal I’ve set before, they were usually half-hearted, and this one has my whole heart in it and is actually giving me confidence already!  So hopefully I will be able to give good updates every once in a while on here so people can track my progress if they want!  I’ll take ANY support I can get!!