Fitness update pics for July 14, 2008 – Week 6

Since I’ve been belatedly posting all of these pictures tonight, they were all pretty old. Right now we’ve caught up though and these are the most recent weekly-pictures until I take the next batch tomorrow.

Having uploaded these pictures for all of the weeks up to today all in one night, I must say that this week and the second week were the only sets I was proud of. Comparing this week to the beginning I’m actually starting to be able to see some change. Hopefully in a couple more weeks I can finally move from four-pack to six-pack!

Also, now that we’re up to date, please give me feedback! What parts of my body need work (any tips on how to tone them up are appreciated), what’s coming along fine, etc..

Thanks for any comments/tips you can give me!

Fitness update pics July 07, 2008 – Week 5

I’ve lost a little weight in my waist which is somewhat surprising because I thought I was too skinny before. I guess I had some extra flubb there. I’ve put on a couple of pounds overall, but I’m not sure I see it. Can’t really tell if I’m making progress.

Fitness update for June 30, 2008 – Week 4

One more week down. In the second pic I look kinda silly with a vein on my neck popping out… I must have really been squeezing hard! Oh well.

Fitness update for June 23, 2008 – Week 3

Two weeks down, 14 to go. I look pretty junky in this week’s pics. Part of it could be lighting (I was in a different place taking the pics) and that I had just eaten… but part of it was probably also that I did really poorly that week.

Fitness update for June 16, 2008 – Week 2

Just to be clear: week 2 means that this was taken at the start of the second week after one week of training. It should also be noted that this was our one-year anniversary. We didn’t talk/email or have any other contact which was odd and painful, but I went out with some friends so that I wouldn’t sit around dwelling and sulking. That was really nice of them esp. given that this was a monday.

As far as the contest goes, this week felt really productive:

I had a little fun there and blurred my head into the over-head lighting.

Fitness contest so-far

(SCROLL DOWN FOR PICTURES)
In the week after my wife left me, I lost 7 pounds – partially because I couldn’t force enough food down and partially because your body releases drugs when you feel horrible that make you deteriorate (endorphins, etc.). This contest started a few weeks later and seemed like the perfect opportunity to give myself a nice measurable goal to help me rebuild, give me an outlet for my frustration, and to keep my mind off the problems at hand.

It is a 16-week contest, there appear to be about 100 people entered in it, and at the end the person with the most improvement wins a game console or something. I just want to win for the thrill of accomplishing something and overcoming a challenge.

As I mentioned earlier today, I’m going to start tracking my progress on this blog. Since the contest started on a monday, I’ve been taking pictures every monday, so I’ll put them all up here.

The contest has a special focus on abs, runs for 16 weeks, and the winner is picked based on improvement between before/after pictures (which have to have a newspaper in them to show the date).

Side-note:
The faces are blurred because I’m planning to stay anonymous throughout the use of this blog. I don’t really have the hang of that yet though… if you prefer a certain blur method (spiral, horizontal, etc.) please leave a comment. Another possibility would be to just crop the pics off above the shoulders, might also look weird (again, please leave comments with opinions).

June 09, 2008 – Week 1

ENTRY-PIC (this is where you try to look as mopey as possible):

The same day, me flexing as absolutely hard as I can. These are the two best from that day (they’re pretty blurry though). In retrospect, the damage doesn’t look nearly as bad as it felt. I felt super-skinny when I first looked at these.

If you want to track my progress (for whatever reason), subscribe to the feed for this blog since I’ll be uploading each week’s photos after I take them.

Going to start using this as a tool again

This blog was a great tool to help me focus my thoughts in a productive direction in the face of what feels like total destruction of my one, pure shot at getting everything I wanted in life.

I tend to postpone writing here when I know I don’t have time to explain current situations, but that means that this blog is constantly getting ignored.

What I’m going to do about it

If you’re familiar with the blog, you know that things went badly and I intend to use this blog to track my recovery.

Right now, I’m about 6 weeks into a fitness competition I started in early/mid June which goes until September 29th. The purpose of entering this is so that even when life seems hopeless for other reasons, I’ll still have a motivation every day to rebuild myself physically.

To keep me accountable, I’m going to start posting pictures of my progress and logging what I’ve done. Please encourage me when I’m doing well and call me on it when I’m slacking!

Commenters were a great help in the past, so hopefully I can bank on their help some more.

Been a while…

I haven’t written here in a while because things have been moving pretty fast & it’s a little painful.

For a while I was functioning at a fantastic rate.  Then I saw her again & we got along great.  That threw a massive wrench into things and set me back more than a month.  I’m starting to get a little better again though.

Today she chatted with me on Google Chat “just to talk” for the first time in a long time.  This is what lead me to come back here.  I need to reason through things again.

My healing since the setback has been unacceptable.  It will be changed immediately.

TODO:

• Write about the setback
• Write about everything else since the setback
• Write about how to move forward (complete, objective, rationality).

Pain is my purpose

I’ve come to realize that the reason I was born is to suffer.  My life has been filled with wonderful things and wonderful people… for the sole purpose that they be taken from me.

Strike One

It first started when I was 9.  My best friend in the world was my 16 year old cousin.  She was smart & funny and about the most selfless and kind human I’ve ever encountered.  She was in the middle of high-school but was actively involved in a ton of charities, including helping battered women and single mothers.  One day everything was fine when I woke up but by that night she was in a car-accident and died.  No warning.  Just gone.

The world makes no sense to lose someone like that.  Fortunately my new puppy (I got him a month earlier) was there to comfort me.  I spent years trying to live my life in a way that would make up for the loss of my cousin.  I did a lot of charity work (there were two charities established in her name and I think I raised $1,400 over four years for them) and tried to be a good person.  This wasn’t enough to balance her out.  I do not think it is possible that I succeeded. The only way I got over it is that eventually my memories faded and I don’t remember her at all.  I know the stories and remember the details, but I can’t picture or feel what it was like to be with her.

We moved shortly after her death, so I spent a lot of time with my puppy.  He was always there for me and became my best friend.  We were so close that I spent several years planning to become a veterinarian (until I discovered that they had to dissect human cadavers in school and I didn’t think that was something I could handle after my cousin’s death).

Strike Two

Six after my cousin died my puppy was now becoming a dog, when I came back from vacation to discover a tumor which was a large hemisphere that protruded a few inches from his abdomen and was probably 8 inches long.  The growth was so rapid that it tore the skin and got infected.  We battled the cancer for six months.  The wound became an ally since it let the radiation work inward from more directions, but it also became horribly infected while he was at the radiation clinic.  The wound was deep and would probably hold four liquid ounces.  To get rid of the infection, I irrigated it many times every day with betadine.  At one point we thought we had it cured.  But then it came back everywhere.  Tumors grew over his eyes and he spent his last days completely blind.

At this point, natural human pattern-seeking led me to believe there had to be a reason for this rediculous shit.  It occurred to me that whoever I loved the most was being taken from me.  I had a 2 year old brother at the time and was horribly afraid he would be next (fortunately he’s still okay).  I decided that maybe this was all just to use me.  If I eventually were to put an end to vehicular deaths and make sure cancer was cured completely, then their lives would have been sacrifices instead of senseless destruction.  It’s a long-shot but I was given an very rare IQ (top 2%ile… I’m in Mensa), so it might make sense to do this to me.

I spent the rest of high-school and most of my college days working.  I was convinced that I had to have a purpose.  I’ve always felt that a normal life wouldn’t work for me… so I started working hard to try to become something useful and to figure out what my purpose was.

In college I didn’t drink, but I did meet friends & had an exciting time… I just worked to a nearly sociopathic level.  I didn’t date or hookup with anyone… I kept my eye out because I knew I didn’t have time to date “for fun” and had no desire to cheapen my eventual relationship by sleeping around first (I’m old-school).

Six years after my dog died, I caught a break.  An amazing woman approached me.  She was everything I had ever wanted and then some.  She was ambitious, extremely intelligent, drop-dead gorgeous, and just plain fun.  My cousin & my dog would have approved.

We both fell deeply in love & decided to spend forever together.  We bonded deeper than I’d ever bonded with anyone else.  She made me a man & taught me what it was to smile and feel pure, guiltless happiness. I thought that this was my reward for the hard work I’d done and would continue to do: if I give enough to the world, maybe I was allowed to be happy.  I thought about her all day, every day.  That fall, I dropped out of college to pursue my internet-company full-time.  I got some seed-funding and started up.  College (which is where the business was being run) was out of state, so every weekend I would drive 5 hours down to see her and 5 hours back.  Because this would be her last summer before Med school, we had to get married that upcoming summer (2007) since she wouldn’t have any time to get married in Med school.  So that spring, on our one-year anniversary I proposed.  It was the most fulfilling moment of my life when she said “Oh God, yes!” My company launched our product and we planned our wedding & found a house to buy.  Four months after the proposal, it was summer and we got married.  To support us, I’d had to stop working on my company and lined up a day-job to start after we got back from our honeymoon.

Strike Three

After we got married, there were good times and bad times. No abuse or cheating, I have no other relationship experience of my own, but I’m pretty sure we only had normal fighting. Six months later her heart had turned cold to me and she decided to separate. I tried to fight it for a while, and we went to marriage counseling, but she still wanted to separate. She said she still loved me and we should still be married, but live apart. I wasn’t there for the transformation, but every time I saw her the news was worse. Eventually it has become clear that I’m going to be just another ex-boyfriend to her. We were going to spend a final night together, but today she cancelled that. She’s trying to forget me. I don’t even have a chance to say goodbye. She’s going to mail the divorce papers to me.

Everyone I know, goes away in the end.

I can’t go any further into the reasons why I love her or what great things we did together or how much this hurts because it’s almost too much to bear as it is.  Suffice it to say that this is the most pain I have ever felt.  And this time, I’m coming up entirely blank as to any possible purpose or reason or light at the end of the tunnel.

Until today I had been postponing the pain as much as possible.  I kept telling myself there was hope that she would come back to me without sleeping with someone else first (I know that’s not supposed to be a big deal in this society, but it is for me.  She’s my wife… that would hurt more than anything).   Today it became obvious that she’s trying as hard as she can to completely forget me.  There’s no chance she’s going to let me back in.

No solution

Even suicide wouldn’t solve this one. It comes close when you think about it: it’s the only way to keep her from committing adultery, (since we’re not getting annulled) and also for me to be able to have her be my wife for the rest of my life. That would hurt her way too much though (guilt) and would fuck up a lot of other people’s lives too (my little brother is 10 right now), so I don’t have to consider it too seriously.

End of my whining for the day

My life is one long series of suffering. I think I just have to accept that no matter what I do, I’m not going to be immune from ungodly amounts of pain. I have to move forward. For once, I have to try not to look back & try to make sense of things, because there is none. Just have to keep moving…

Tonight I’m going to finish a pretty important feature for one of my sites. Every single day I’m going to move forward so fast and so hard that I only have time to feel pain in short bursts until the next time I’m leveled.  I don’t know what’s out there that I should live for yet, but when I find out, I’m going to go out and take it.

Fuck you world.  I’m coming for you.

Ice-skating uphill

Sliding down…

I feel like I’m trying pretty hard. Not as hard as I’m capable of… but pretty hard nonetheless.

I’ve been forcing myself to do some sort of workout every day. It’s usually been kinda weak: a set of pushups and/or curls, but often it’s a decent chunk of a workout. Apparently it’s not enough. Today I weight 164. Down another pound from when I started this blog.

As I said recently, I still have no long-term plan. My wife is leaving me… that doesn’t mean I can just “get over it”. I don’t want her to go… she doesn’t even have a good reason. It’s like she’s breaking up with me like some high-school crush.

Another bad day

Tomorrow, I’m going to my parents’ condo in Florida. for the weekend (I’m in their house right now alone… they’re down there). To get ready I had to swing by the house and pick up some things. When we first got separated I didn’t grab very many clothes at all, I was a little distraught and was hoping to be back at the end of our planned 2-week separation period.

I emailed N to find out when she’d be away so that we didn’t have to run into each other. When I went in it was crushing as always (she’s scrubbing the house clean of me). Just more redecorating. When I was in the bedroom grabbing clothes I did something I knew was going to be painful: I picked up this yellow legal-pad she’d been keeping by the bed. I remembered she had a list in there at some point (before we were apart) which was basically reasons to leave me. One of them was something along the lines of “want for more money”, but I couldn’t remember the wording so I figured I’d look for it.

The List

Well that page is apparently gone, but I found another page that ruined my day and probably a few more to come. It was a list of guys with timeperiods. It closely resembled a list of people she dated but the weird thing is that there were a lot of discrepancies from what I’d been told. For one, there was a guy on there three times which she’d told me she went out with twice, as in for two time-periods each for a couple of months (he kept trying to bug her while we were going out too). On top of that, there was another guy on there with “2 months” who she told me she’d never dated and at one point later said they went to a Hokey game together but it wasn’t a date. There was a guy she said she went out with once and it said “3 months” by his name. There were also people who I know she went out with once who weren’t even on the list. Then at the end was my name and “22 months”. WTF is that? I don’t know what this number can possibly mean. We were together for 24.5 months before we split up. She took a 5 day vacation to NYC basically to convince herself she’d be happier without me… which ended on our 24 month anniversary.

Maybe this list is something like “how long I liked [so-and-so]“, but in that case I want the two months when she fawned about me before she asked me out. I’m totally shafted. Why do I care about the dates? Because she’s trying to erase from us what we had. I hate that… I can’t even have reality from the past in tact. At this rate she’s going to convince herself eventually that she was just young & naive and never loved me.

We had an amazing love. That’s why I haven’t been able to let go (even though it’s painful as hell holding on) and it’s why I can’t bear the thought of the past being erased. In Boston a guy called out a window at us something like “Aww, that’s true love right there. You are the cutest couple”. In Rochester, a lady said something like “You are the best couple I have ever seen… you’re so cute.” In Pittsburgh a woman on an elevator said “Aww, you guys look so perfect together. You’ve restored my faith in love… maybe there is someone out there for me”. Seriously… like a 30 second elevator ride. There are a million other indicators that we were great together, but I can’t bear to get into them right now.

Back to the list…

The worst part about this list isn’t even the discrepancies from everything she’d told me. She tended to lie quite a bit and she’s pretty good at it, so I’m not too surprised… she never cheated or anything so I was willing to live with this. In fact, it’s less that she lies and more that she’s just able to justify anything by looking at things a different way, so she probably just changed the rules (they say intelligent people are the best at this and she’s no exception). That’s also how she could talk about the importance of loyalty and “forever” constantly and have our entire life planned out, then just casually decide she didn’t want to be with me anymore w/o even taking a shot at trying to patch things up.

…but I digress. The worst (most painful) part of the list is that she made me into an item on a bulleted-list. She bulleted me. Hurts about as much as if she shot me. I think it was probably just a mental exercise on her part to trivialize what we had and just try to think of it as another item in a series. I was the 12th item on the list (she only dated starting at 18… we met at 21).

Why can’t I let go?

I think it’s because I know we were meant to be together. She’s making an epic mistake and I just want back what we had. I’m still not ready to start pretending everything’s going to be okay without her. I should probably set some kind of time-limit on how long I’ll let myself think that way (say 6 months?). In that time I’ll have to get my act together (get out of my day-job and work for myself again fulltime… the tension of the day job was probably the single greatest reason the marriage fell apart – probably?) and try again with N. When I was asking her about the possibilities of getting back together, she gave me the “someday maybe”. For me, I would rather endure almost any pain than have that “someday” be after she’s with another man. This is my wife, she’s my everything. The only thing I need to keep. I don’t think she’ll be ready after 6 months… but a gorgeous (unbelievably) woman like herself isn’t going to be able to stay single probably even a year. Especially if she bullets me into unimportance.