Baby, it's COLD outside.

I'm REALLY trying hard to make friends with winter.

I think I may have been meant to live near the ocean. I love to swim, feel the warm sun on my exposed skin and hunt for shade if it gets too warm. I lived on Newport beach for 6 months or so and really enjoyed it. I sure didn't enjoy the crowds and insanity that seemed to come along with it. But, on Newport Beach, I never once had to scrape sun off of my car windshield or shovel sun off of my sidewalk.

Be that as it may, here I am. Smack Dab in the middle of cold country, in the dead of winter.

I have been trying to land on an activity that puts me outside in the snow with a smile on my face. That's no small feat, I dislike skiing, snowmobiling and ice climbing. They all take too much gear and are more than I want to invest in. I was thinking about the gentle art of snowshoeing. I spoke to my friend Jimbo and asked if he had some shoes that I could buy, he said, "Steve, I have just the thing. I bought some snowshoes about ten years ago, used them once, and will NEVER go again. It was torture".

So . . . there you have it.

I had the snowshoes and actually looked at them with intention last year but didn't have the gumption to try them. So I stored them away safely where they wouldn't hurt anyone.

This year I have actually been snowshoeing a few times and let me tell you . . . it's not much fun at all. It's like taking a very strenuous trudge through ridiculously deep snow in freezing cold temperatures for no good reason at all. AND, even with the snowshoes on I still sink nearly up to my knees in the snow.

There's no real payoff in snowshoeing, it's just a long walk in a circle in adverse conditions.

Maybe I'm missing something?

The "Chuck Norris" of Swimming

Something very cool happened to me tonight, my young friends at the pool gave me a new nickname and a new shirt.

The Chuck Norris of Swimming

I'm all kinds of proud.

My swimming career began when I was 6, my mom took me to the pool for some lessons, I had a fascination for water and she was worried about me drowning.  

The pool we went to had a swim team, I really wanted to be on the team, I begged my mom to let me try out, I overheard her speaking with the coach one day, she asked what it would take to get me on the team, the coach told my mom that I really wasn't cut out for swimming, he suggested that I try something else.  Well, a couple of years later I'm pretty sure I'd proved the coach wrong.

I swam from the age of 6 up to to the age of 12.  Swimming practice two hours a day 5 days a week year round tends to burn a little guy out, even on something he loves.

I picked up swimming again when I was about 18, I swam for a few months to get myself in shape for a triathlon.  After the race, I stopped.

Two years ago I decided to pick it up again, I'm really enjoying my time at the pool, it's been a lot of hard work, but it's been paying off as well.  Not only is it good exercise, but swimming on  a team adds an element of fellowship that was lacking in my exercise life.  It's hard to stay motivated 

when you're all by yourself.  That isn't a problem when there are others around with similar goals.  

I swam my first race since making my comeback a few months ago, it was an open water race, the swimming leg of a triathlon relay.  The course was about 900 yards long, there were 364 swimmers ranging in age from 14 to 75.  My time was fourth best overall.  with less than three seconds seperating 2nd, 3rd and 4th.  The overall winner was only twenty seconds faster than me.  

Not bad for an aging grandfather with asthma and a bad heart, eh?

"Chuck Norris" can hardly wait for his next race.

People tell me I'm strange.

I took this picture from my desk at a job I recently moved on from. I sat at this desk for 6 years. The wall looked pretty much the same for all six years.

I guess that in itself isn't all that strange, the real strange thing about me is I've eaten the exact same lunch for three years now.

My lunch philosophy is simple: If it's working; why change it?

As you know I shed about a hundred unwanted pounds a few years back and I really don't want to find myself in that condition again. So I've concocted an eating schedule that I adhere to with great care.

I have an uncle who I worked with for about ten years and he ate the exact same lunch every day for the ten years I worked with him. My lunchtime regimen must certainly be genetic.

I eat many times per day:

Breakfast is a shake made of a scoop of vanilla flavored protein powder, 1 banana, and 16 oz. of vanilla flavored soy milk.

I then hit the pool where I swim laps for 2 hours, 4 days a week.

At 10:00 I eat an asiago cheese bagel.

At noon I eat a MetRX Big 100 meal replacement bar, apple pie flavor.

At 1:30 I eat a banana.

At 2:00 I hit the weight room for 35 minutes, four days a week.

At 3:00 I eat another asiago cheese bagel.

At 4:00 I eat 1 oz. of salted cashews.

At 5:00 I eat another banana.

Monday I play water polo for two hours after work.

Tuesday and Thursday I swim for another two hours after work with the Leopard Sharks swim team. My yardage total for Tuesdays and Thursdays is usually right around 10,000 yards, counting morning and evening sessions.

I take Wednesdays and Saturdays off from swimming, I usually run or drag my tire sled on those days.

Sunday I swim for an hour.

I'm a creature of habit I guess??

Dang, when was that picture taken?

Those of you who have known me through the years have seen a definite physical transformation, during the adult stage of my life my weight has fluctuated anywhere between 185 pounds and a peak of 312 pounds.

My mom is an unbelieveable cook, during my childhood, my love of food coupled with my mom's ability, served to produce a very husky lad. I was heavy all the way through school, it wasn't until I hit about 18 that my weight came down into the normal-for-my-height range.

I did it through exercise, mainly swimming - oh, that and not eating mom's cooking certainly helped.

I did pretty well keeping my weight down all the way into my mid thirties, I was very active physically, participating in hockey at a pretty high level, and eating carefully so as to have the energy I needed to compete. At my fittest hockey condition I weighed about 200 pounds, which looks really skinny on my 6'-3" frame. I stopped playing hockey when me and the family moved to a tiny corner of Southwest Colorado, unfortunately I forgot to stop eating like a hockey player. My 8,000 calorie/day diet coupled with my slower-with-age metabolism quickly produced the 312 behemoth in the second pic, that pic was taken about 5 years ago.

The pic on the top was taken this fall, it's me sporting about 212 pounds of muscle on my big frame. It took me 2 years to lose the weight and I've managed - through meticulously careful eating and rigorous exercise - to keep my weight down for 3 years now. The worst seems to over now that I've learned to eat for fuel and recovery. There are the occasional falls from grace, but I get back on the bicycle. (Hence the bike pic - That's me on my daughter's beach cruiser she named, "Deborah".)

People who are locked in a struggle with their weight have my full appreciation. People who are blessed by the skinny gene - or whatever the heck it is that keeps em skinny - sometimes look down on us who have the food weakness, but let me tell you something, taking off and keeping off weight is a titanic struggle. Food isn't like smoking where you can quit and never touch a cigarette again, food is something that we must consume to survive. Learning to manage our eating is one of the hardest battles we'll ever have.

I show the people I work with pictures of the fat Trout and they stare in disbelief, like they're looking at an entirely different person. In some ways they are, but in most ways they are not. One interesting facet of being skinny then fat then skinny again is you get to see how differently the world treats fat people, like they're some kind of an inferior race or something.

Remember as you go through life not to see people as objects, inside every person is someone that wants to be loved and accepted, and YOU have the ability to make that core need a reality.