Day 1 = Victory
By Rich Winter
Have been wanting to do something different on Monday morning, something positive, ya know...get the week off to a good start kinda stuff. It's a bugger when you wake up at 4:30 on most days, knock out a blog or two, goof off from 6 to 7 a.m. and hit 8:00 a.m. with the notion that this could have been the day I started.
Panic Button's dirty little secret: I smoke!
I'm sure more than a few people know or notice this but I make that kinda hard cuz I sneak and skulk around and change jackets five times a day so the residue of the last cigarette won't waft into the nasal passages of someone I know who matters to me...and dang it if that's not a lot of people. The guy driving to Rosebud to the council meeting with his shirt and jacket off in the dead of winter, that's me, I just don't want to roll up into Tribal Council smelling like a dirty ashtray.
One of the reasons I'm coming clean is as I've gotten older I realize that I'm a lot more like other people that I think. The same fears and difficulties I have, other people have. The same struggles I have, lots of other people have the same struggle. I'd like to think that somehow through putting my thoughts on paper that perhaps someone else might benefit and someone else might have the courage to step forward and try to improve on some aspect of your life.
If I had three words of advice for any young person it would be...."Never Start Smoking." It's gross, it smells bad, it's bad for you and ultimately it becomes so ingrained in your-self that it overtakes everything.
I have some serious hangups with smoking, it's my crutch, but enough about that for today, because today is about victory. Have been dabbling in working out at RST Diabetes Prevention as of late. Try going a couple times a week that usually starts with blowing off Monday morning, getting busy during the week and sliding home on Friday with at least one trip to the local workout facility.
I have good intentions, but life is busy and while I disdain working out in the morning, the truth is I'm up, I might as well do something productive. One more thing on smoking, one of the things I really hate about it, it it just cuts my wind to much and doesn't allow me to do what I'd like to on the treadmill. Can't get a light jog broken out because the inevitable cough will come and in that moment, I hate not being able to hide that I'm a smoker.
And so, this morning, with my habitual self screaming at me to do what I always do, I pulled myself away from the information super highway, put my phone down, left my cigarettes in my desk and made it to Diabetes Prevention.
I'm a guy of routine and so it hurt my head like crazy to only do ten minutes of cardio instead of the 20 I normally start with, but I figure, hey, if you're ripping the scab off ya might as well go big. Two sets through a little circuit I have set up with about five machines, a sit-up machine and the let's get pumped curls with 25-pound dumb-bells. Worked through it twice and normally I would have been satisfied, but I still needed that 20-minute of cardio, so I got back on, and walked for another ten minutes.
Ahhhhhh, sweet victory.
My good friend Jodee Wike always tells me that I'm too hard on myself and that I over-think things way too much. I tell her I'm fat and she says, you don't look to bad...I get this self image thing and while I'm not 400 pounds I'm not where I'd like to be. I understand the self image thing and I don't look in the mirror and hate myself. I'd like to be a tad thinner so I don't feel uncomfortable wearing tight pants, (getting bigger pants hasn't seemed to help), but most of all I'd like to be more active again. I'd like to be able to jump on the court with the TC and SF kids during layup drills, in open gym without fear of coughing a lung up or not getting across half court after two trips up the court.
So, as we head towards the Holiday Season I'm coming forward with two goals.
* Quit smoking by Lakota Nation...(I don't have a plan yet, but somehow I feel like talking about my secret and getting it out there somehow moves me/universe forward in figuring out how to and making a commitment to make the decision to quit.
* Be under 225 pounds by January 1 - Since I moved here in 2005 the least I've weighed was 226 and that was when I was running a lot. Too scared to weigh today but guessing around 240. It's an aggressive goal but one that with the small changes I'm hoping to make isn't out of reach.
That's it, that's me....Let's see how this goes!!!
