I haven’t actually managed to make New Year’s Resolutions in a couple of years. I was so tied up in Chaplin being sick last year that all I could manage to get out was this post, a sentiment I’m tempted to share again this year.

For some reason, though, I’m not as angry. Probably helps that Chaplin is sleeping on my feet right now and not in an animal hospital, doped to the gills and recovering from surgery.

Probably helps that I’ve finally made a decision to move forward on getting out of showbiz. Probably helps that I feel like I’m on the right path, trying to learn something new instead of just flailing around.

I also think I’m done with actual weight resolutions – I’ve lost 86 pounds and would like to lose the 14 more that would a) take me to an even 100 and b) put me at a BMI of 25, but I feel like that’s going to be a long, frustrating process that’s not really worth making New Year’s Resolutions over. Better to focus on time goals that, while promoting weight loss, feel somewhat more achievable in the space of a year.

So, in the hopes that publicly stating what I want to do this year will give me some motivation to actually do it, my New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Finish redesigning my damn website by the end of January.

The blog is actually fine – it’s the main site that’s a travesty, not updated since 2003. I’ve taken about four stabs at redesigns that have never actually launched, and I am completely out of excuses for why it hasn’t. Happening by the end of January, dammit.

2. Lower my 10k elliptical time to consistently under an hour.

The frustrating part about this is that my ability to do this varies from machine to machine – I’ve actually done this on a couple of machines, but on the machine I use regularly, I’ll need to cut a minute a mile off my time to make it happen. I think over a year, I can do it.

3. Lower my 2 mile swim time to under 1 hour 10 minutes, and start swimming 4km from time to time.

4km is about 3/4km farther than 2 miles. I want to be swimming 5k’s at some point, but I know I’ve got to get my stamina back up quite a bit from where it is now – having the flu absolutely killed a lot of the progress I made this year in terms of building up stamina. Just got to keep putting down the building blocks.

4. Learn as many new programming languages as possible, with the goal of having a working iPhone application before I go back to school in September.

I’m going to be doing a lot of self-directed learning over the next few months, so I think I need to set a goal to give me some motivation to actually get off my ass and learn things. I think I’ve got a good idea for a program, so we’ll see how it goes.

5. Remember that if my plans and resolutions don’t work out, there are always more plans to be made.

I’m already moving from Plan B (TV mogul) to Plan C (professional nerd), and Plan C has many sub-plans of its own. I just have to remember to keep going with the flow, and try to make enough money to keep myself and Chaplin fed and sheltered in the meantime.

And that’s it. Hopefully everyone has a fun evening tonight, and hopefully 2010 starts off with a nice Northwestern Outback bowl win tomorrow morning, and next year we get into an even better bowl that doesn’t start at eight in the goddamn morning.

Happy New Year!

I got tossed a research project, which is very good for the pocketbook but not so good for having time to do much else. So instead, it’s time for a little shameless bragging in photographic form.

Left: January 27, 2007, about three weeks before I finally snapped and decided to do something about my weight.

Right: April 29, 2009.

Ladies and gentlemen: The power of “eat less, exercise more.”

It’s been less than a year since I first headed south on the Marvin Braude Bike Trail, a trail I’d formerly been content to ride the five or six miles north to its terminus, then turn around and stop wherever I’d started.

The first time I rode south, I got my ass handed to me. I rode with my friends Jessica and Dan to Hermosa Beach, about 15 miles south, but not anywhere near as close to the end as we thought we were when we cried uncle and went to an Irish pub for a burger and a beer.

By the time we got back, I wound up availing myself of Jess and Dan’s offer to give me and my bike a ride back to my apartment, because I wasn’t sure I could make it the final two miles without falling over into oncoming traffic.

The next time down was even sillier: I decided to ride to the end of the trail, which I thought was about half a mile south of the Hermosa pier, but was in fact at least 3 miles further, two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier.

But I managed to not only make it all the way to the southern terminus, I managed to do that AND make it all the way back to my house in one piece. I could barely move for two days afterwards, having brought nothing but a ton of water and a granola bar with me, but I did it.

I’ve been working towards riding the whole trail ever since, incorporating such radical ideas as “bringing a lunch” and “drinking some Gatorade.”

I wanted to go for it last week when my car needed the first of its two hideously expensive repairs, but last week it was so windy I had to get off and walk for long stretches of time.

But today, during repair #2, it was overcast and about 65 degrees with minimal wind. I ate a giant breakfast, and I set out with lunch, granola bars, a crapload of water, and 32 ounces of Gatorade, and I did it.

I rode the whole fucking 44 mile round trip trail in just under 5 hours, including a couple fairly long stops for lunch and another rest when I got all the way to the north end, and a bunch of shorter breaks.

Once you throw in the six miles I rode getting to and from the mechanic’s, it works out to almost exactly 50 miles. And while I’m pretty damn tired, I’m not the kind of bone-exhausted that I was after that first ride south.

While the weight is not coming off the way I’d like it to anymore (although at least it’s staying put), it’s milestones like these that make me feel like I’m still making good progress.

25 months and 1 day after I set out to lose 80 pounds I have lost…80 pounds!

I decided a while back I want to try and take off another 20 to get down to a BMI of 25, so I’m not done working out like a nutbar or keeping a ridiculously close eye on my food intake, but still, I’m pretty happy.

I honestly didn’t know if I could do it when I set out. I had tried to lose weight so many times and had it come roaring back after three or four months that I just didn’t know if I could do it.

And it definitely took me longer than I wanted it too – I initially set the fairly unrealistic goal of losing it all in 18 months, and then revised that to two years. I can’t tell you how frustrated I was that I hadn’t hit that goal (missed it by three very stubborn pounds), but I learned some time ago that plateaus are a big, frustrating part of this process.

But to finally, finally, FINALLY be where I wanted to be, 25 months and one day later, feels pretty goddamn great.

Especially when they tell you “if you have the same cold I have, don’t work out until you feel 100% better. You’ll just wind up feeling way worse.”

Felt better-ish Wednesday, much better Thursday morning so I worked out, a bit worse Thursday night, worked out yesterday morning because I thought it was just the morning blahs, horrifying all day yesterday, and wound up going to bed at the ever so hip hour of 8:30pm last night.

And now the Martian Death Cold is back and is much more Martian and Deathy than it was before. Whee!

Two years after I set out to lose eighty pounds, I have swam and swam and ellipticaled and biked and I have now lost…seventy seven pounds.

So the pace I set for myself last year was a little ridiculous – I wanted to lose 38 pounds in eight months, and I didn’t really take into account how much harder it is to take the weight off when a) I’m actually working all the time and b) once I’ve gotten the easy pounds off.

I’ve still got three really fucking stubborn pounds that won’t come off, and the evil that is the Craft Service Table is fighting back at me, calling out to me with its delicious croissants and mini-cupcakes and banana cream pudding and on and on and on.

But when I start to get discouraged after some fluctuation, I have to look at what’s changed:

I used to wear double XL men’s American Apparel shirts. Now I wear a large.

I used to wear 44 inch Levi’s loose fit jeans, which weren’t all that loose. Now I wear 34 inch loose fit jeans, and they actually are loose-fitting.

I used to be 5′4″ tall on a good day. I thought the doctor made a mistake at my physical this year when she listed me at 5′5″. They measured three times. I was so overweight it was compressing my spine by an INCH.

I’m now within three pounds of weighing what I weighed my junior year of high school, when I was in the best shape I’ve ever been since I stopped growing (or at least thought I had).

I used to have a BMI of 42.9, which was almost 3 points over Morbidly Obese. I now have a BMI of 28.8., which is now finally out of Obese and simply at Overweight.

I have come a long damn way. And I’m close to my original goal. Original, because the goal has changed. I have come this far, I can go farther. I can get my BMI to 25, the top of the normal range. Ain’t no way in hell I can get to the middle of that range, I’m just built too stockily. But I can get to the top of the normal range.

To do this, I have to lose 23 more pounds, for an even 100 total. This is going to be…well, very difficult. I’m aiming to have it done by this time next year, but I know it’s not going to come off terribly fast anymore.

These are the pounds that have been on for 10+ years, and these are going to be the ones that are the hardest to convince to go. These are the ones that demand I start eating salad and vegetables on a regular basis, that I work out hard five days a week period end of discussion no matter what.

Of course, I’m on the verge of being unemployed again early next month, so I’ll be back on the broke-ass diet, the single most effective diet and exercise program I’ve ever been on. Not having the money for alcohol or eating out and having time to work out for over an hour every day tends to help with weight loss.

But as slow and painful as it will be, I still have confidence that because I have come so goddamn far that I can go just a bit further. It can be done. It’s only a matter of time.

I am tired.

A lot physically tired, a little tired of getting run into the ground at work, VERY tired of this election, frustrated-tired of the stupid plateau I hit with my weight, tired of just having no time to do anything except work out, work, and sleep.

And the latter of which I really don’t have as much time to do as I’d like. Which is why I’m dragging myself to bed right now. Whee!

Prep is always pretty brutal. Trying to formulate a system to get everyone all the information they need, figuring out exactly what information they actually do need, and even simply trying to get a grip on who the fuck everyone is before we start shooting is a time-consuming and exhausting process.

Adding onto that the increasingly Herculean task of dragging myself to the gym an absolute minimum of 4 days a week to try and keep the weight loss going, and time for damn near anything starts to evaporate.

And of course, only in my world is it a problem that this is all happening as almost every show on television starts to premiere. Sure, I have a terabyte of storage space on the big TiVo, but I want to watch everything noooooooow. And by everything, I mean the 30+ hours of crap I plan to record every single week.

All in all, I just need the days to be longer. As much as the prep process sucks, I like my job. And the working out has left me feeling physically better than I have in a long time. But I need more sleep, and I could really use some more time to myself during the week.

Alas, for now, I’ll just keep rolling along, taking the occasional Saturday off the gym and then deciding to make up for it by doing a gym triathlon on Sunday. And sleeping like a hibernating bear on the weekends.

I went for a looooooong bike ride today. I wanted to do the entire Marvin Braude trail, but I came up a little short.

The entire trail is 22 miles each way, and I have to bike 2 miles each way to get to the trail. If I’d done the whole thing, I would have gone 48 miles.

Instead, I went all the way to the South end, about two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier. This was about 5 miles South of where I stopped the last time I rode the trail, which was a significantly larger gap than I had realized, so I was a lot more tired by the time I reached the South end when I thought.

The wind was whipping pretty good coming back North, so I think that’s part of what tired me out so much. I think I also need to bring more than a granola bar along to refuel.

I wasn’t really hungry per se, but I noticed I got a lot more tired than I did during my last ride that far South, during which my friends and I stopped for brunch. Pancakes and Guinness are apparently a far more efficient fuel than one wee granola bar.

But I managed to get all the way back to the Santa Monica pier, which is just over 18 miles north of Redondo (and about 3/4 of a mile north of where I got on) before my the combination of the setting sun and my body saying “GET OFF THE BIKE!” determined that I should probably head home.

I wound up breaking down and buying a comically overpriced 20oz Gatorade at the S.M. pier, and I felt WAY better after that, so perhaps I shall invest in some for my next ride.

However, I did 39 miles total, which is nothing to sneeze at, and about 80% of the entire way. We’ll see how many of my limbs I can actually move tomorrow, but for right now, I’m pretty happy I managed to go as far as I did.

When I was swimming while I was in Idaho, I thought maybe the pool might be a little longer than the pool at my gym, since it was taking me a solid six minutes longer to finish 100 lengths than it had been at my gym.

The folks at the pool in Idaho swore up and down that their pool was 25 meters. The folks at my gym swore up and down when I asked them this afternoon that their pool is also 25 meters, even though it felt noticeably shorter than the one in Idaho.

So, there are three possibilities:

1. The pool in Idaho is actually longer than 25 meters, meaning the pool at my gym is 25 meters.
2. The pool at my gym is actually only 25 yards long, meaning the Idaho pool was 25 meters. This also means I haven’t been going nearly as far as I’ve been thinking I have.
3. The fact that the Idaho pool was outside and at moderately high altitude and the pool at my gym is inside at sea level is playing with my speed and perception, and the pools are actually the same length.

Frankly, I think option 2 is the most likely, given that at my pace the 6 extra minutes it was taking me to finish in Idaho is about how long it takes me to swim the 214 meter difference between 2500 yards and 2500 meters.

How much of a tool would it make me if I showed up at the gym tomorrow with a measuring tape so that I can find out if I’ve actually been swimming 2500 meters or 2500 yards?