One tubby, tubby, tubby!

I have never been a skinny person.  I am the oldest of 5 and the only one that is not a stick.  I'm also the fastest eater out of all of us.  I think I learned early on that if I was not the first one done eating, I didn't get seconds!  When I was little (like 5) my mom told me that I should play soccer because when I run around so much, I'm not as fat.  And then on my first day at a new school she told me I should suck my stomach in when I walked around so I didn't look so chubby and the kids wouldn't make fun of me.  I think I actually managed to hold my breath that entire day at school.

Well, with my frame size, genetics and eating capabilities, gaining weight has never been a problem for me.  I used to spend ALL of my spare time either on the baseball field or lifting weights, so I got pretty big while playing through college.  I was a catcher, and at 6' tall, I topped out at 225 and found my best playing weight to be 212-216.  When I graduated college and was no longer playing at an extremely competitive level, I switched to something else that I could excel at. Drinking.  I was damn good at it but found that my playing weight rose a little bit with this new sport...

It wasn't long before I had grown bored with this new challenge and moved on to triathlon.  I never raced as a clydesdale (200+) although, for my first few races, I definitely could have.  My first real year in triathlon, I took off training like a mad man and my weight plummeted.  I bottomed out at 168 and was lighter than my brother for the first time ever!  Over the offseason however my weight rose again and I have been struggling to get down to the 169-172 range, where I feel most comfortable racing.  But now, my stomach, which I have named Albert, must die.  If I am going to step my racing up, I need to not be carrying around all of this extra weight.  So I'm going to list my weight on the sidebar every day so that Matt and Marcia and anybody else that might happen to read this blog can give me grief.  Maybe this will be the last bit of motivation I need to get to the weight I should have been at in March.