During Pictures. Again.

This is my friend Sharon. We went to high school together in Richardson, Texas. It's freaky that I am old enough to have had the same friend for nearly 30 years. I met her in 9th grade in Algebra class. As one of many kids do not reach abstract thinking by 9th grade, she struggled. She's smart, always did her homework, but her brain just wasn't ready for Algebra in 1980.

I sat in the back of class and read, notably the trashy Flowers in the Attic series, never doing any classwork or homework. From time-to-time, I'd glance at the overhead projector screen, and it always made sense to me, and return to my book. I was not a good girl, like Sharon. But, I got As on all my tests. Mr. Ayers had learned early on that it was just best to leave me be. (I've paid my dues since then, obviously.)

I let Sharon cheat off me during tests. Then Mr. Ayers started handing out two versions of each test, so, she then she'd just hand me her test when he wasn't looking, I would do the problems lightly in pencil, and hand them back. She wound up passing Algebra. But before you think less of her, the story has an ethical and happy ending: Sharon, with her low threshold of guilt, retook Algebra a couple years later IN SUMMER SCHOOL, to make sure she understood it. She got an A. I thought she was crazy for doing that, but now I'm proud to have a friend who recognizes that there are no short cuts.

Sharon graduated in the top 10% of our 1983 class (over 600 kids graduated). I graduated in the lowest 10%. I'm not making this up. It caused a great deal of distress and angst - in my parents, not me. Sharon went on to college, then established her career, then marriage, then children. I, or course, did things is a slightly different order. Sharon worked for the Forest Service for a long time, before changing her focus to start her own business as a landscape designer and be home for her kids.

Sharon has always had a problem with her weight, in that she had difficulty gaining it. She suspects an overactive thyroid. I never had much problem with my weight until later on. I joked with her earlier this week that if would could somehow average our bodies, we'd make two normal people.

Sharon is more or less intruigued by my interest in multisport insanity, the way one is intruigued by a friend who has become involved in some sort of weird cult. Not enough to be involved in it herself, just interesting to watch.

In any case, look at me. Just LOOK at me. All of me. This is going to be my before picture, although, in this entire journey, perhaps it's more of a "DURING" picture. I know that for me, two things work:

1) I MUST track my food. If I don't, it's too easy for me to just start eating, eating, eating and the next thing I know I'm downing a few thou calories a day.

2) I have to have a program that lets me "earn" extra calories for doing exercise. On this day, we climbed a small hill behind my house called, "The U mound" (seen in the background of the picture of me, above) and I was distressingly breathless. I even had to stop once or twice to catch my breath. Time to get my butt in gear.

Last night, Baboo and I signed up for the AtomicMan Duathlon, near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

I've done this before, always the "Little Boy" course. (Yes, the two distances are charmingly named after the two atomic bombs that ended WWII) The little boy course is 5K run, 20K bike, and then a 4K run. The bike is hilly, on mountain roads with sharp turns and steep climbs.

The "Fat Man" course is a 10K run, 40K bike (including going down and then back up out of a canyon) and then a 5K run. It is essentially an Olympic triathlon with the swim having been replaced by a 5K run.

So guess which distance I signed up for. In two weeks. I expect to die around noon that day.

Hopefully, I won't, because these last pictures of my big fat butt are not what I want in a frame next to my casket.

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