From couch to somewhere... anywhere

Lots of great races all along the Jersey coast. Great area to be in if you're interested in triathlon.

Thank you so much for the reply and I apologize for not being able to finish my first ever post because I was on the road (and was out of town) when I signed up. It's just now that I got to finish it. So here it goes.

"Hi there.

Typical of newbies, i've also been a long time lurker of this forums for about a year now. It's just now i got the courage to sign-up officially since this site has been of a great help to me for this past year.

I live here in Jersey Shore, NJ and i am 40 years old. Since January of last year i have been diagnosed with hypertension with the typical profile of a metabolic syndrome: obese type 1, pre-diabetic and such.

I've never been an "athlete" at any stage in my life. Aside from your typical high-school physical ed requirements and a couple of unofficial college sports activities, I've never taken part in any high level and organized sport. I was more of the "studious" and "nerdy type" poring over books and stuff. In high school and college my body composition is more on the thin side until late college and early part of my regular career where I gained considerable weight until January of last year (January 2016) where I hit 230 lbs for a 5' 4" height. What really got me worried was when my older brother died of sudden cardiac death at age 49.

My brother's early death really opened my eyes so with that I bought a used Landice L7 that was barely used by a neighbor and downloaded the C25K app on my iPhone and just started shuffling, walking then running anyway I can. So now at roughly one year mark I am currently at 174 lbs and can run 10 miles straight at around 10 min/ mile pace. Currently weekly mileage is run around 25-30 miles a week majority of which is on that treadmill and have been itching for the winter weather to be over since I find treadmill routines harder than road running.


All my life I have never been introduced to water safety so I really never learned how to swim. So last January I signed up my whole family to our local YMCA and I personally started just doing back floaties and then tried teaching myself how to swim. With this website and a couple others (swimsmooth) I tried mimicking the videos and descriptions on how to do the front crawl. So now after about a month of every other day swimming I can do a full lap (on a 25 yard pool) of front crawl with no loss of consciousness (yehey) and water tread for about 5 minutes straight. My plan now is to join the masters swim group after I nail my freestyle form a little better and have decent endurance (atl east be able to do 200 yards straight decently) so as not to embarrass myself.

Currently, I have a wallieworld mountain bike that I bought from a local yardsale last December, I have only test and used it a couple of times based on my poor-man's/diy bike-fitting knowledge I read here and a couple of other websites and I hope to regularly use this cheapo bike once the weather breaks to introduce myself to cycling. Once I outgrow it I hope to upgrade into a proper one: my deal with the Wifie is if I reach 150 lbs before June of this year (2017) I will buy myself a decent road bike with a proper bike fit from a proper bike shop.

My goal for this year is to finish a local 5k, a 10k and possibly a duathlon. And once I get decent times and routines on all of the three disciplines I hope to join a sprint.

So guys (and gals) I'd like to thank this website and all contributors (from the official moderators and to those highly active users) cause you have been my resource for this past year. I have never felt so good in my life and I thank you for all your efforts.



Edited by Sakuji 2017-02-20 12:06 PM

Good work & good luck Sakuji!

Ben