How did it all begin?

So how did it get to this point? How had my weight gotten so bad that I know weighed 375lbs. On May 22, 2003 my life changed. That was the day I was reborn. I don't mean in the religious sense, I mean physically reborn. That is the day that I underwent gastric bypass surgery.

I was always active in high school and college, but over the years with work and kids I had let myself go to the point that I needed to change. I had lost weight in the past, always to regain the lost weight and more. I don't believe anyone wants to be fat or likes to be fat. I never really thought of myself as a truly fat person until the day I tried to ride a roller coaster at an amusement park. I was unable to pull the safety bar down and was told I had to get off the ride. Talk about a humiliating experience! It was two months later that I made the decision to do what ever I needed to do to get the gastric bypass surgery done.

I know that some people think that having gastric bypass surgery is the "easy way" to lose weight. I love it when some celebrity or some other person talks of how they lost 100+ pounds "without surgery". Then you see most of those people a year later and they are fatter than ever. Losing weight is easy. KEEPING THE WEIGHT OF IS THE HARD PART. I wanted to be able to play with my kids. I didn't want my kids to be known as the kids with the "fat" dad. I wanted to ski with them. I wanted to ride bikes with them. I wanted to get down on the floor and play with them. I wanted to ride on a roller coaster with them! I wanted to change my life for the better.

I recognized that keeping the weight off was my biggest weakness and I felt surgery was the one thing I could do to better my odds of successful weight loss. Gastric bypass surgery is becoming more acceptable all the time. I think as more people come to understand that keeping the weight off is more important than just LOSING WEIGHT, surgery becomes a much better weight loss solution for many people.

I had my surgery on May 22, 2003 at George Washington University Hospital. I knew when I left the hospital 3 days later that my life would be changed forever. I credit the doctors at GWU for saving my life.

I know it sounds cliche to say I knew my life would change forever but I really did feel that way. I knew I was going to do whatever I could to lose my excess weight and KEEP IT OFF! I kept a food log and did EXACTLY what my doctors said to do. I ate what I was supposed to eat and worked out every day. I actually started working out in the morning before work and the evening after work. I was committed to losing the weight. Over the first year after my surgery I had lost 145 pounds! I am WAY, WAY over simplifying what I did over that first year. I worked my tail off to lose that weight, but this is not a blog about the benefits of gastric bypass.


Over the next couple of years I continued to exercise and kept the weight off. But as any former competitive athlete knows, you eventually want more. I was in my routine of working out and maintaining my weight, but I wanted to do more. I needed to have a goal. I needed and wanted a goal to work toward. So I started running. I entered a few 5k races and liked it. I had never before been an active runner. But I started running regularly and enjoyed it. I loved being able to compete against myself, to better my time each race. Running a race was a way to measure my improvement.

Then in the summer of 2007 my friend Steve introduced me to biking. I had never ridden a bit with those skinny tires. So I went and bought a road bike. After a couple of rides I was hooked. I loved riding my bike. It was something I looked forward to each time I scheduled a ride. I looked for opportunities to ride. Before I knew it I was riding 20+ miles every Saturday.

At this point it was the fall of 2008. I had successfully kept off more than 125 pounds of my original weight loss. I was considered a gastric bypass success story. I had been running for a couple of years and biking for 6 months. The thought of a triathlon started to enter my mind....