The Lead Sled

I am not a good athlete. I’m 37 now. It’s finally time for me to admit it.

When I was 6 years old, my family moved into a neighborhood that just so happened to be home to 6 or 7 boys within 1 year of my age. Most of us played in the same little league baseball and YMCA basketball league. All of us played backyard baseball, football, and basketball. These competitions led to both fist fights and friendships, and several of my closest friends now can still be linked back to those childhood sports.

I put a lot of stock in my performance in these sports. I was raised on stories of Mickey Mantle, Wilt Chamberlain, and Fly Williams, and there were times that I assumed, as a lot of kids do, that all of us would eventually be playing these sports in front of TV cameras. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at any of them. I am tall, but other than that, I wasn’t born with many natural gifts. My vision is horrible. Until a recent PRK surgery, I had massive glasses for as long as I can remember, and I’m also colorblind. The latter doesn’t really matter much in these sports, but whatever… we’re sharing things right now. If I ever made contact with a baseball, I could hit it a long way, but my lack of hand-eye coordination only allowed me to do so in the rarest of situations. I write frequently about my putting struggles in golf, and I also never mastered the things in these other sports that required similar touch. I developed a decent jump shot from distance in basketball, but the closer I got to the rim the more likely I was to hammer the ball off the backboard so hard that it wouldn’t even hit the rim on it’s return trip. Additionally, even though I was bigger than most of my friends, I was weaker. I know they weren’t lifting weights in elementary school, but they all seemed to develop natural strength much earlier and better than I ever did. Above all of these things, if I had to choose one place where I wasn’t even in the same ballpark as my friends it would be running.

I was so slow. My uncle coached my little league baseball team, and he would sometimes give me the “steal” sign (if I got hit by a pitch or managed some other way to get on base) and then just start laughing. One year in Fall baseball, I was dubbed the “Lead Sled” by a different coach, a name my friends are still happy to bring up. By high school, I had committed to golf as my sport of choice. I had four coaches in four years. One of them, a former football coach, decided that we were going to lift weights and run like a football team. During the first practice, our team probably set a record for the least amount of weight ever moved in a weight room, and then we were all tasked with running a mile. I finished with a time over 14 minutes. I wasn’t last. One of our other guys didn’t finish, but we were side by side for most of it. We never had another weightlifting or running practice.

Despite being very active, I was overweight throughout this time and for most of my life. I was afraid of the scale, but I know I measured over 300 lbs in high school. I graduated high school in 2006, and the summer after I lost almost 100 lbs. I did it through diet and exercise, but it was the kind of extreme diet and exercise that doesn’t normally lend to lasting weight loss. It didn’t for me. By the time I graduated college 3 years later I was bouncing between 260 and 280 regularly. In any case, during the brief time that I was lighter, I was faster, but I still wasn’t fast. I ran a decent amount, but I was still typically running over 10 minute miles. I ran one 5k race with some friends and was just happy to finish while they were trying to compete with all the cross country runners from our town.

Even though this period didn’t end with me hitting all my fitness goals, it did show me that this was something that I wanted. For the next decade, I would look back on that time “when I was in good shape” and long for it. I would occasionally sign up for a 5k. It was a coin toss whether I’d be in shape enough to run by race day, but signing up did often motivate me to run more. I dated a runner during this period, and I trained up to 8 or 9 miles with her for a half marathon she was planning to run, but then I started having knee pain and backed off rapidly. I would continue to have on and off spurts of running, but I couldn’t seem to keep my weight under control.

After finishing grad school in Nashville in 2016, I moved to Atlanta for a postdoc job at Georgia Tech. I found an apartment that was roughly a 1.5 mile walk from my office, and I walked to work almost every day. During my first semester, I didn’t lose any weight, but I start to feel more energy after walking these 3 miles 5 days a week.

During the winter break, I decided to start making some changes to my diet and fitness. I started doing 3 exercises, body weigh squats, pushups, and crunches, every morning, and I started subbing more vegetables into my diet, planning my weekly meals, and eating out less. With these changes, in 2017, I dropped from somewhere around 280 lbs to around 210 lbs. Suddenly, I had energy and I was lighter than I had been since middle school (outside of that one summer). I started occasionally running near my apartment at Piedmont Park and the Atlanta Beltline. Eventually, this turned into a habit. Since this time, I’ve had some people make comments about how I started running and then lost all this weight, but it was actually the opposite. The running was a side effect of losing the weight and having more energy. In fact, I tend to gain a few pounds whenever I train for longer races. Running burns calories but it comes at the price of being hungry all the time.

The changes I made during this time, unlike the summer after high school, have been more sustainable. I wish I could say I had done these exercises every day since then. I haven’t. I’ve missed days. I’ve missed weeks. I’ve even probably missed months around my childrens’ births. But I still do them most days almost 9 years later. I’ve continued to slowly improve my diet. I’ve had ups and downs with that too, but I’ve consistently eaten better than any other decade of my life. I’ve stayed between 205 and 220 for most of the time since then, and I don’t have measurements for it, but I’ve definitely shifted some of the weight from fat to muscle.

I’ve also fallen in love with running. I went through a year of freely running (no training plan or anything) in 2017-2018. I was traveling a lot for work, and I ran on every trip. It became my way of seeing new places. I ran in storms because I was terrible about checking for weather before starting. I ran in early mornings, in peak Atlanta midsummer heat and humidity, and late at night. At some point, I decided to start signing up for races again.

I ran my first half marathon (Atlanta’s Invesco QQQ Thanksgiving race) in 2018. I trained for it with the Atlanta Track Club’s training program and ran it in 1:56:10, accomplishing my goal of sub-2 hours. Not bad for the Lead Sled.

I met my wife during the training process, and the following year we trained together for and ran Memphis’ St Jude half marathon. I never got back to the same point during training, (I was switching careers and moving during the time which took a toll on the training.) and she was courteous enough to slow down during the race for us to finish somewhere around the 2:06 mark.

Somewhere around this time, I realized I had run a half marathon each year of my 30s, and I decided that I would make it a goal to do something similar every year. I didn’t have to run a half marathon each year, but I wanted to commit to do something that required a couple of months of fitness dedication similar to the training for a half. I’ve hit the goal every year so far, mostly with half marathons, but with a couple of trail races and a 3 month hike, bike, walk, and run challenge mixed in on other years.

The only downside so far is that, even though my overall fitness has improved, I really haven’t gotten any faster. My other half marathon times have been closer to the 2:06 mark instead of the 1:56 time. My interval runs have been slower. My old Lead Sled memories creep back in occasionally and make me wonder if I’m just not built for running. Over the last few years, I’ve started pushing harder in training to try to get back to and hopefully surpass my previous times. My training times have improved, but the fastest actual race time I’ve achieved is 2:01:07. On the plus side, this all gives me an obvious goal, and it keeps me signing up for more races

I’m not really sure what I’m doing with this blog thing, just like I’m not sure about what I’m doing with the golf side of it, but I suppose I’ll share some running thoughts and results from time to time. Maybe one of these days I’ll figure it out what I’m doing, but as the stories above show, I’ve never been fast.