8 February 2014 - Pittsburgh
The following essay won’t get you into Harvard Business School. It won’t even get you an interview, frankly. That said, it’s one of my stronger short pieces.
Beep. Beep. The treadmill chimes as I hold my finger down on the speed control and it ramps up after a moment - beep beep beep beep beep beep beep and we’re in gear. I rachet the time up to 49 minutes; that’ll let me finish seven miles.
48:51
I don’t remember most of the story Tim told that night, but a sliver has been seared into my memory.``He was this big guy” - Tim holds his arms in a circle before him wrapping some invisible Santa Claus girth - ``he must have been” - short pause as he conjures a suitably large number, ``two fifty. And he goes…” I don’t remember the rest of it. But if anyone tells you it’s impossible to blanch and blush at the same time you’d know they’re wrong since that’s exactly what I did.
46:07
At the time I weighed about 260 pounds, the product of chronic overeating and a nasty side effect of medication. Despite the momentary mortification I felt listening to Tim’s story, my weight didn’t bother me much.
43:49
My weight didn’t bother me much usually. Then things changed. I changed. I decided that I did care. I decided to do something about it.
42:18
My legs groan and I shudder slightly as my body adjusts to being put in gear. I haven’t run distance in about a week and there’s that awful adjustment as I ask myself if I’m really doing this. Are you sure you wanted to run for that long? You could take today off, go home and curl up with a book? Shut up. I’m doing this.
So how’d I do it? A friend once asked; I told him he wouldn’t like the answer. I ate less and exercised more. But that’s not really what he asked, and in some ways it’s not really what I did, it’s just implementation details. What did I do? I made a series of choices. Don’t eat that cookie. Run that extra mile. Don’t eat that other cookie. Run that other extra mile. A series of choices, one after another after another. The question ‘How did you do it’ so often ends up focusing on the mechanical aspects, but that’s not the challenge. The challenge is finding the will, the energy, and the devotion to persevere through the failures, the setbacks, and ever present temptation to give up and go home. The challenge is to keep chasing the things we want.
8:32
I haven’t caught this one quite yet. I’m getting there though: I’m down about eighty pounds and holding steady. My doctor, meanwhile, has started chiding me about other things. This is something I’m proud of.
0:00
Ultimately the guy in the mirror is responsible for many of the struggles in my life, but he’s responsible for this success too.
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