I'm Hoping You Can Learn From Me!

I always tell people that I started running after I started walking when I turned 30, but I’m coming clean today. I had a brief stint as a jogger when I was 24. I wanted to lose weight and look good for my wedding photos. I lost 40 pounds in three months, so I want everybody to learn from my experience. That’s right — don’t have your bachelor party two nights before your wedding!

Real quick, just in case you’ve never been here before, click here to see why I’m trying to run 61 marathons in 2010 for Train 4 Autism. We’re in December now, so I’m getting pretty close to that goal. I’m through 58, only three to go!

Anyways, for the most part, I was really heavy (261 pounds) when I turned 30, so I started walking and then one thing led to another and I was able to run 3.4 miles in 40 minutes on my hills about 4 times a week about eight months later, in July 2005. That’s when I feel like I started to run. But in 1999, I took up jogging to lose weight for my wedding.

Coming out of college, I was pretty heavy, about 245 pounds. In late February of 1999, I was determined to lose weight for my wedding, which was on May 23. Those wedding pictures last forever. I had to look good!

I was living in Kansas City and basically all alone. Tiffany was out west and all I did was go to work and go home, waiting until we got married. I used to drink a good 75 or so beers a week while I was in college (I graduated in December 1998). I don’t want to say I was an alcoholic. Maybe I was. But I liked to party and I had a ridiculous tolerance. I was a big guy with plenty of weight to soak it all up and I drank about five nights a week when I was in school. I also ate a lot of pizza and Burger King.

So starting in late February, when I moved to Kansas City from Manhattan (Kan.) to start my job, I was determined to do what I could to get in shape. I changed my habits, cold turkey. I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol or pop once I got there. Every single meal I ate was prepared inside my kitchen. And when I say every single meal, I mean every single meal. I didn’t eat at any kind of a restaurant between the end of February and May 17. I didn’t know the first thing about nutrition, but I kept my calories low and my fat intake very, very low.

I started to exercise, walking a bit. I worked that up to jogging and I covered four miles a day, maybe four or five times a week. When my fitness peaked back then, I covered those four miles in 44 minutes. Twice, I ran six miles. Well, jogged. I did pushups (girl pushups, on my knees) and drank a lot of water.

I got down from 245 in late February to 203 on the day of my wedding. When you have excess weight like that, it melts like butter when you work at it. I flew out to California three days before my wedding and people were shocked at the transformation. I was so excited to be getting this positive feedback. It was a nice ego boost for a recovering fat guy.

Two nights before the wedding, I went out, um, establishment hopping in a gigantic limousine with about 12-14 friends. I had a beer at the rehearsal dinner the night before, but that was the only alcohol I’d had in three months. I had also shed about 20 percent of my body weight. For whatever reason, it didn’t occur to me that my tolerance had dropped drastically.

In the hour or so before we headed out, I had eight beers. Normally, I would have had about a dozen before going to the bars when I was in school. So throwing back eight beers wasn’t any kind of a big deal. We got rolling, went to pick up some people and I kept drinking like I normally did. I peed in places I shouldn’t have and started getting goofy, so it was business as usual.

We got to the first, uh, establishment, and I had a few more beers. I really didn’t keep count at that point. I might have mixed, too. I don’t really remember. I just know we left to go to another place and as as we got there, I got sick and threw up pretty badly all over the parking lot. I never threw up when I was in college. I clearly wasn’t the rock star I used to be.

Amazingly, at the place we went to, there was an establishment that women could go to, and surprise, surprise — Tiff was there with her gang for her bachelorette party! I don’t remember much of anything other than laying in the limo with my head face down and hanging out of the open door. There was a little bit of commotion with Tiff’s group, but the brain cells that hold that memory died that night. All of my friends went inside for a couple of hours, except for a friend of mine, Rob, who stayed back with me.

My next memory is waking up the next morning on the floor in the hallway of my parents’ house. I got up because I had to pick up a friend of mine who was flying in from Kansas for the wedding. I had a nasty hangover and headache and I had fairly foggy vision in one of my eyes. It was totally weird and I felt like garbage. I picked up Tiff at her parents’ house and we went to the airport. While we were there, she looked at me and told me my eye was swollen.

I was relieved, in a way. At least that explained the nasty pain in my eye. There was no discoloration — it was just swollen. But I had no idea how it happened. When we got back to the house, I spent all day holding ice on my eye, hoping the swelling would go down. That made me feel pretty proud, considering all the out-of-town relatives were over for a barbecue. But I had to do what I had to do — the wedding was less than 24 hours away!

I talked to my friends and found out what happened. Apparently, two of my good friends carried me in, but they were a little drunk, too. They accidentally knocked my eye into a doorknob. Oops!

I slept with ice on my face the night before my wedding. I woke up on my wedding day after a lousy night of sleep, hoping the swelling had decreased. I saw my stepmom and asked her how my eye looked, and she hesitated for a second before suggesting I just look in the mirror for myself.

Sure enough, it was a dark shade of purple. And yeah, it was still swollen. We put makeup on my eye so it would be the correct color, but there was nothing we could do about the swelling. The color was fine for the ceremony, but by the end of the reception, it started to wear off and you can see the purple in parts of the video.

I have to say, it was pretty embarrassing to walk around with a black eye on my honeymoon. It was a bummer at the time, but it’s no big deal at this point and we look back on it and laugh. It makes for a heck of a war story.

Hopefully, any bride-to-be or even groom-to-be can learn from my experience. No bachelor parties two days before your wedding!

So much for losing weight and looking good in the pictures, huh?