Saturday, November 22, 2008

Let me explain

A lot of people blog. A lot of people blog about sporty endeavors. Commonness is usually enough of an excuse for me to avoid any effort. In spite of that I am starting this for a few reasons: I have some relatively interesting potential hurdles to impede my ironman progress and I hope that this could be helpful to someone with similar situations.
The basic gist is that I spent my late teens and twenties doing lots and lots of drugs. The last seven years of that period I focused primarily on heroin. I say focus, but it just kind of happened. I am one of THOSE types. I smoked on and off for about 23 years (the last 8 years more off than on). I have hepatitis C directly from the IV drug use and I have type I diabetes indirectly from the drug use.
In 2000 a friend of mine ran a marathon and the description of the insane horrible experience that he wanted to repeat intrigued me. Junkies are like that. There was only one way for me to feel the sensation so I trained for and ran the Seattle Marathon. That started an ever-growing obsession that now leads me to training for Ironman Cozumel. 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking and 26.1 miles of running in heat and humidity of which I am not accustom. I love the conjoined feelings of longing and dread.
This blog will be part training chronicle and part flashback scenes. At times I plan to talk about unpleasantness and extreme happiness. I plan to talk about the depths of human despair and the glories of human accomplishment. I plan to talk about self will and turning to focus to God and others. These are some lofty blog goals, which I may or may not achieve, but what the hell, I also seem to think I can finish an ironman.

2 comments:

FrazzMom said...

Awesome- can't wait to read more!

Barb said...

Andrew, glad you started the blog! Now I feel guilty about not going home and learning how to work the overpriced stop watches that we bot own.