Getting off the sofa.

Week 1

An introduction, bear with me while I set the scene, most of my posts won't be this long but this one needs to be some manner of a confessional to get the ball rolling.  Here's some music while you read, Rancid finally have a new album coming out and I couldn't be more excited!

So, on Sunday I was sitting at home, watching the previous night's UFC event, (UFC 178 Demitrious Johnson vs Chris Cariso, great event start to finish) I'm a huge MMA fan and I was feeling envious.  Not of the brave men and women beating seven shades of out one another for my amusement but of how well they moved, their fluidity and speed.  I, on the other hand, feel like I'm moving under water most of the time, a great, fat, lumbering mess, always in pain and often out of breath.

Now the reason I felt so bad on Sunday is that I didn't always feel that way, not long ago I felt great.  Early this year I was in the best shape of my life, I was training at 12 Rounds Boxing in Clapham with Kat & John "The Bomb" Bryson 3, 4 sometimes 5 times a week, eating really well and even hoping to have an amateur match in the early summer.  Then I developed a problem in my shoulder (Bursitis) and the whole thing went to pot, the pain was too much for me to be able to train and I went through some medical treatment and started physiotherapy.  The shoulder injury made it very hard to sleep, awkward sleep led to a long term back problem flaring up worse than ever, which made it difficult to walk and in turn exacerbated another old injury in my ankle, out of nowhere I pulled a muscle in my calf.  FFS.

Now I've got a long history of being a right miserable bastard with a tendency to wallow in it (not a professional diagnosis you understand) and this was frustrating, depressing and I hurt all the time.  Comfort came in the form of junk food, booze and inactivity (being still being the only time I wasn't in pain).  Before I knew it my shoulder was mostly healthy but I'd spent 4 or 5 months piling on the weight, fallen into a rut of bad habits, not doing any exercise, and making occasional guilty half hearted attempts at cleaning up my diet. I was feeling generally terrible about myself.

So, back to watching the fights on Sunday, feeling envious, so decided to do something I'd been putting off.  A few weeks previous Kat from 12 Rounds had reached out to check how I was doing and saying when I was ready I should get in touch with her to talk about getting back to business.  Now, the idea of getting back in the gym was daunting, I knew it  would be difficult & I knew I wouldn't be able to do nearly as much as I could previously, I felt embarrassed about how I looked and felt and how I wouldn't be able to keep up with classes.  I couldn't run up the stairs without huffing for breath.

Kat had another idea though. We talked for a while about both how I was doing physically and where I was emotionally so rather than me just jumping back in to the gym where I was before, she suggested (on the condition that I had to commit to it) to doing a 12 week course where she's going to plan when I work out, what I do, as well as helping with nutrition, motivation, weigh ins, measurements and other bits and pieces and I'm going to keep a blog about the whole experience.  There's a few others doing the course too, the idea to keep us all accountable.

So here we go.  At the time of writing I've worked out twice, felt a bit nervous wrapping my hands for boxing but my shoulder was OK with some light bag work and getting in the gym early morning, before work, without lots of people there stopped me feeling quite so awkward.  Another good talk with Kat about how this is going to go and I'm feeling ready for the challenge. It's easy to forget that great feeling you get after working out, it felt great to finally get off my arse off the sofa and I'm looking forward to the next session.  It's 12 weeks 'till Christmas, 12 weeks at 12 Rounds and I'm planning on feeling great for the New Year.

Thanks for reading this far, future posts will be a bit more concise.  As a reward and because this a blog on the internet here is a kitten being adorable