The Four Seasons of Snow

Friends, I am sure you recall “The Great Race”, in which I was racing my good friend to see who could lose 25 lbs. That race is now over.  The results are recorded below.  But there is another Race going on as well, and it too was celebrated this week.  That story is also below.

The Great Race:  My friend, Wayne, and I were racing to see who could lose 25 lbs the quickest.  He was employing tactics like utter starvation and the potential removal of his larger appendages.  I was employing a low-carb diet accompanied by a lot of exercise.  My goal was to hit 194.5 lbs, exactly 25 under where I started several months ago.  Today, as evidenced by the picture at

Sweet, sweet victory

right in which my feet are now exposed to the entire internet community, I have achieved victory.  I have remained below 20 carbs and 1500 calories per day for two months.  And I have been walking and wogging (walk/jogging) and biking and shoveling and wheel-barrowing and digging bricks and laying bricks and visiting hotel workout rooms and walking in airports and doing pushups and situps and bacon and eggs and celery with butt rub (this is a long story) and broccoli and cauliflower and salads and salmon for two solid months. The last week has been a sprint, with an average of ten miles a day on the bike. And the longer I went in this diet, the stronger I felt. And you know, I can honestly say that I was never hungry.  I now weigh 193 lbs.  I am a lean, mean, fighting machine.  And as I write this, I am celebrating by drinking a very large frosty beer and eating an entire bag of pork rinds. Tonight, we are going to Dairy Queen so that I can get a Reese’s Cup Blizzard with chocolate ice cream. My pancreas will probably explode.  It has been inactive for two months. I am fairly convinced that I will use the low-carb lifestyle for some time to come, of course moderated a bit.  This is no longer a sprint, but I do like the lifestyle. 

I was certainly aided in this quest by my friend Wayne’s barbing, by my friends who responded to this column with words of advice, by my little dog Riley, and by my wife, Gloria.  My friends found great herbs that help burn fat when on low-carb diets.  My dog accompanied me on over 200 miles of bike riding, and my wife cooked the right things and made dieting very, very easy.  Which brings me to the next subject of this week’s article:

The Greatest Race – This week my wife and I celebrated our 27^th wedding anniversary.  Marriage is also a race.  It is unquestionably – and hopefully – a marathon.  Marathons require great training, great resilience, and great motivation.  They require a love of the race itself, a tolerance for fatigue, a love of the feeling of accomplishment, and a love and understanding of the teamwork and the individual contributions that make it doable and rewarding.

Twenty-seven years is a long time, but ours is actually longer than that.  We dated for seven years prior to marriage.  We were high-school sweethearts, Queen/King of the prom, etc., etc.  I owe the success of this race, so far, to my wife, Gloria.  It is her conviction, efforts, adjustments, and tolerances that have made us a family, and I love her 27 times more than I did the day we were married. I look forward to finishing the race with her.

Our kids, Brad and Lacie, got us a very nice present.  It was a DVD of the pictures of our life – so far – put to music.  And we watched it, and we cried, and we smiled, and we laughed.  Life isn’t always what we want it to be, and I can say that there are a few portions of my life where I am still not fulfilled.  But my family is not one of them.  I can only wish the same for you. Below is a very, very small collage of a very happy family.

Best to you this week,