About

Trust me when I tell you this site, much like myself, is a work in progress. I'll come back and update this eventually, but for now I'm just gonna copy-pasta my intro blog post.

I've been "blogging" since before it had a name. I created my own custom "blogging" software way back in the early 2000's for my site(s), then jumped over to Wordpress for a while. I never seem to stick with it. I've usually just been doing it to practice with writing code. I'm a software developer by trade, and I used to find it helped me to stay sharp to write code outside of work. Honestly, there's a bit of that going on here. I'm playing with using Astro to build and manage this site. That said, I'm not trying to go for any design or architecture awards here. No fancy build systems, just some static posts written in markdown, checked into a GitHub repo and pushed up. From there Netlify does its magic and we're posted on the web. Seems simple and easy enough to keep up with. I do not know if I'll end up wishing I used a blogging platform with a database. Honestly, I doubt we'll get that far.

The reason I wanted to start this blog is to have a place to ramble about recovery from alcohol abuse, struggling with eating like an asshole and working out. I know it's tiresome to hear about, but working out daily keeps me sane and happy.

Here are the highlights of my life. I intend to really flesh this out at some point, but for now quick bullet points will have to do.

I was a skinny kid until about 5th grade
I was a husky pants wearing fat kid until I started playing football in 8th grade
I was an "in shape" and athletic kid through high school, playing multiple sports, though I did tend to pudge up some in the off-seasons.
I lost sports and found beer and became a really fat kid my first 2 years of college. There were easy to ignore AUD signs present even then.
I found running, forgot the beer and became a really fit, kinda fast runner, completing several half-marathons and one marathon in my last two years of college and first year of "professional" life
I got busy with life, stopped working out, began lightly indulging in beer and lots of fast food through early professional life and marriage
Had a kid, found my love for running again; Ran a few half marathons in the 1:30-1:35 range, but also found the running community really embraced beer. Sounded good to me!
I liked beer, embraced it; found lots of folks in subarbia and my stage of life seemed to like beer; craft beer (and scotch and bourbon, how refined?!?!) became normalized; slippery slope re-activated;
Got in a car wreck of which was not my fauly, but I have no memory. No, not related to alcohol but it really messed up my psyche to have been in a wreck with your two small kids and have no memory of it
Stopped working out; kept drinking booze and eating like an asshole. First real hints that maybe I was drinking too much start to appear, but my wife doesn't seem to notice, so I soldier on, but the typical problem drinker promises, and broken promises and rules around drinking start to popup and get ignored pretty quickly.
My dad had an elective surgery to try to head off a potential brain aneurysm; the surgery didn't go well and he was never the same. It was tough on my mom, and I didn't cope well. The guardrails around drinking got taken away, and everyone was "understanding" of it at first, but it spiraled kinda fast.
Went from overweight to obese-obese in less than a year drinking craft beer all the time; lost the off switch and started drinking until I'd pass out more nights than not. Once I got started, boom, it was on.
Wife noticed; wife didn't like it. I lied, and tried to sneak it and we fought a lot. Much damage done to relationship and my health; probably hers too.
It took 3 years of eroding trust and a few good blowout fights before I pulled myself out. It wasn't easy and there were a lot of failed attempts because I always thought there was a "reset" button and I'd be "fixed"... For me there is not. The fix is never touch the shit again.
I slowly realized having no drinks is much easier than trying to control it. I never wanted a beer, I wanted all the beer. The first drink really is the problem for those of us that make it this far down the line
Eventually embraced that there was no "fix", I just couldn't ever drink again and made myself ok with that fact. I read alot of "quit lit" and listened to a lot of podcasts. Spent some time in the "Stop Drinking" IRC channel from Reddit, as well as reading that sub and later the al anon sub.
Last drink was on October 5, 2019. Stopping that time was really no different than the other serious attempts I'd been giving it since Halloween 2016; The intentions and guilt and desire were all the same; Those previous attempts at quitting often lasted 2 weeks, a month a handful of times and 60 days twice. The only difference between those other times and this time was accepting there was no going back; By the time the pandemic kicked in, I already knew I wasn't going to drink even if those around me were waiting for other shoe to drop. I can't blame them. I'd made it 60 days a couple of times then came back worse than ever... Sigh.
During the spring of 2020 while we were all trapped at home I found Rich Froning streaming live workouts on YouTube. At first I just hung out and chatted in the chat. Sometimes the workout times would align with when I was lifting weights, so I'd just throw the stream on and feel like I was working out with them, though I still thought CrossFit was lame at the time.
Summer of 2020 I was feeling pretty low; So fat and out-of-shape even though I'd quit drinking and was "working out". I signed up to Mayhem and started doing very scaled versions of M30
Over the last couple of years I've worked my way up to RX'ing almost every workout on the "Scaled" track, and quite a few on the masters track. I still lack some of the gymnatics skills (and probably always will), but I've gotten quite a bit fitter.
After a week of sugary gluttony at the beach this year I came home and embraced a combination of intermittent fasting and carnivore inspired eating. I've dropped about 30 pounds doing so; I've also stepped off the path for the holdiays, but it's time to get back to it.

That's pretty much were we are today. I'm so close to getting back to being a "normal" weight it can be hard not to get complacent. Not to be arrogant at all, because it's no special accomplishment, but I'm in better shape than the majority of the population, but I still don't quite look like it. I stepped of "the path" for the holidays, but it's time to get back to work.