Of dreams and yo-yo diets

I've been trying to work myself back into shape recently. I know, I know, I should just accept that at 28 the best years of my life are behind me, and acquiesce to the inexorable decline of my athletic capacity. But alas, I find myself assualted on all sides by reminders of the glory days of my past sports career, and frankly, I want them back. You see, despite being now over 200 lbs, I was once a svelte collegiate distance runner pounding out 90 mile weeks on the roads and trails near Boulder, Colorado. Running was more than just an extracurricular pursuit for me, as I structured my days -- and my entire life, really -- around it. I dreamt of running, I daydreamed in class about running, and while I was out there running, I thought about all the running I would soon do. Such an obsession seems absurd to the non-runner, but many who have succumbed to running’s whiles will understand what I mean. Err… they would, rather, if I actually had a readership of greater than 10 people. Anyways…I managed at one point to become a pretty good collegiate runner, though injuries always plagued my training and confounded any attempts to place well in big races or secure admirable times. Ultimately injuries would cut my entire career short, relegating me to the weight room in a futile attempt to keep from becoming a complete and total morass of fatty flesh. As it turns out I became a morass of partly muscular, partly fatty flesh. But I proceeded to medical school and kept myself largely busy enough not to waste wistful hours dreaming of what might have been.

As I mentioned before, though, the reminders have haunted me of late. At first, I brought it upon myself by reading a book called Running With the Buffaloes, which details the glorious 1998 cross country season of my team – during my first year as a non-runner. What a surreal experience that was, to read a book about people with whom I had toiled for hours and hours, doing precisely the things I had done and feeling remarkably similarly about them as I had. At the turn of every page I thought that my name should materialize, and that I should come running into the tale in a blaze of the glory I never had. But the book ended, and I found myself dreaming the self-flagellating dream of What I Would Do Differently If I Could Go Back, Knowing What I Know Now. With that backdrop I have found myself constantly bombarded by images of running. Suddenly my little city in the heart of Missouri has become a running mecca, and everywhere I turn I see scantily clad people striding their way down sidewalks and through parks. To make matters worse, Nike just released a new commercial to molest my memory. It is a take-off on the famous beach running scene in Chariots of Fire, only instead of a bunch of British actors, the guys running by the surf are a bunch of the top distance runners in the country. Lo and behold, after recognizing Alan Webb and realizing that, indeed, Nike populated its running group with real life running superstars, I managed to discern the visage of Adam Goucher, on whose team I had once run. How strange, to see the same face bobbing along on a commercial that I used to see every day in practice!

Anyways, to cut to the chase (yeah right, in the midst of this ridiculously prolix post) I have lately begun trying to ramp up my own running. I keep thinking to myself that the injury that ended my collegiate running has surely healed, and indeed it seems not to bother me at all. In fact, my legs have felt pretty darn good on my mediocre diet of 2-3 miles of running a day (one must build up gradually in these sorts of things). However, a large problem remains: I am one HUGE man. My body has decided, for better or worse, that I weigh 208 lbs. First, I lost about 10 lbs without difficulty over the course of a month. Then, in about two weeks, all that weight slathered itself back upon my frame as I found myself utterly incapable of controlling my food intake. Then, I regained focus and plunged once more below 200lbs. But all of a sudden…WHAM, I’m eating everything in sight and once more attaining my 208 lb set point. Why is this so difficult?

Perhaps this whole running thing was not meant to be after all, and I should just stick to trying to learn brain surgery exclusively. Ahh, the best laid plans of mice and men.