Grocery rambling

When you’re trying to rebuild your stamina, every little bit helps, and so it has become a thing that going to the grocery is part of my weekly undertaking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m also there to buy groceries, but the extra steps and just being out help me improve from one week to the next.

The take away? Don’t underestimate the little stuff when pursuing your fitness goals. It all adds up if you keep at it.

DLH

Plans of attack

Philosophizing is all well and good, but at some point, transformation is about actually doing a thing.

In this case, the first order of business is for me to get moving, and for me getting moving means walking. As things currently stand, I’m struggling to get to the end of my driveway (.3 miles, almost exactly) and back before I’m ready for a nap. That said, it’s a start.

But, it’s only a start. As I mentioned when I started this blog, I am a rambler, and rambling is a state that I want to return to. I’m not sure what kind of times or distances that means just yet, and I’ve yet to consider what kind of payloads I might add along the way (I’m fascinated by the idea of “rucking” for a variety of reasons), but I know that I want to be able to walk further and faster not only than I can now, but than I have been able to in a really long time.

I know some will ask where the muscle-building aspect of this plan might be, and I will be honest when I say I’m not sure where that might fit in with what I am thinking right now. I’m not dismissing the need, but rather, I’ve always had a certain aversion to traditional weight training, so I have to yet find what works for me.

This plan will take on more flesh as time goes on, and I plan to update it regularly with my progress, successes, inevitable failures, and updates.

DLH

So, what’s this all about?

It’s sometimes hard to know where to begin an explanation of something that has been coming my whole adult life, so I will start with the event that triggered the birth of this blog.

A couple of weeks ago, I ended up in the hospital for almost a week as the result of acute pancreatitis brought on by a dangerous elevation of my blood-borne triglycerides. The condition was serious enough the doctors opted to reduce my triglyceride levels by removing them using a process called plasmapheresis. The whole experience was the most intense and painful thing I have ever experienced in my entire life, and I realized that I am willing to do extreme things to never have to experience it again.

That brings me to the reality of how I ended up in that state. The circumstances that lead to my hospitalization were not just the result of some unexplained biological malfunction, although there is also that element to the story. Instead, a large part of how I ended up in that state began decades ago when I, for a variety of reasons I suppose I may get into over the life of this blog, chose to stop taking care of my body.

In fact, over the past decade, I had pretty much given up on taking care of myself at all, most often with the excuse I had more important things to do. I didn’t. Instead, that excuse was worse than an excuse: it was a lie.

This blog will be my documentation of the refutation of that lie. Over the course of the next weeks and months and, perhaps, even years, I plan to document my journey away from the lie of not taking care of myself toward the truth of taking care of myself so I can do all the things I do better. I want to share this journey with anyone who cares to follow along for the accountability of it, for mutual encouragement, and to provide a place to document the things I discover along the way.

As to the name of the blog, once upon a time, I considered myself to be a rambler, or as the Irish call it, a rover. I tend to wander without being lost, and have long believed that the journey is more important than the destination. I suspect my journey back to health will follow the same meandering but purposeful path so many other parts of my life have.

So, this is all about finding my way back to a place I should have never left: healthy and productive. I invite you to join me on that road.

DLH