From pacemaker to half marathon... my story.

Here's a little about me… I am going to warn you now that this is going to be a LONG STORY.

I am 33 (well, for a few more days since my birthday is on Oct. 24th). I am married to my high school sweetheart and the love of my life. We have 2 kids. Our daughter is 6 and our son is 3. I live in a tiny town in PA. I am an IT Project manager for a major healthcare company. I coordinate a cardiology software product and the install at hospitals, which is seriously ironic because I have a pacemaker and I have a pretty serious heart condition. More about that in a bit, I don't want to bore you right off the bat.

Why did I join MFP? Well, it was simple, my pants were too tight and after I completed a big certification that took up a lot of my time, I decided it was time to make a change. At first I was skeptical that I could do it. My lil brother gave me a DVD that changed that though. He gave me the Plyometric Insanity DVD. He told me to try it and that if I wanted to know how out of shape I was, to give it a try. He also said he would be thrilled if I made it through the warm-up. I thought "ya, right" I may be chubby but I am in decent shape... little did I know. When I popped that first DVD in, I thought I was going to die! and I am not being dramatic! I puked! I did make it through the whole thing. I was so sore the next day but I was hooked to Shaun T. I am a very stubborn person so when I couldn't do something, it made me more determined to do it. I started out doing the workouts every 2 or 3 days or until my legs weren't in a ton of pain. About 2 or 3 wks in, I started the Insanity 60 day challenge. I finished Insanity, I lost 14 lbs. and the best part, I felt amazing, the old me was coming back.

Shortly after Insanity, I was invited to run with a few friends. The run the 5K route in the town where we went to HS in. I ran all of it! The spring prior I had started running. I was up to 2 or 2.5 miles at the start of summer. In June of 2010, I went in for a minor surgery that changed my life.

Now let me fill you in on my pacemaker story. I consider myself the luckiest person in the whole world. I went into the hospital to get my tubes tied, I was supposed to be discharged later that day. As I was waking up from surgery, the doctors say that my heart has stopped for 8 seconds. For the nurses out there, I was diagnosed with 3rd degree heart block. It was nuts, they called the on-call cardiologist and he looked at me and was perplexed. They decided to keep me overnight, that turned into a few days and lots of tests. It was determined that I was born with this condition. Over the years, I have passed out about 1x a yr. The last time was about 6 months prior and I was eating breakfast and passed out in my eggs. I never felt it coming. It was weird but I always blew it off as too much stress, not eating enough, etc, etc. I used to also wake up in a cold sweat. They think that I would have the HR block at night, they can actually tell now with the pacemaker that it does happen at night. I never took any meds for this reason, I don't drink a lot because I always thought I was sensitive to meds. The doctors told me that there was a pretty good chance that if I didn't get the pacemaker, I would pass out one time and never wake up. This is the scariest thing to tell a mom of 2! It freaked me out to say the least. It is still weird to me, 1.5 years later to have a pacemaker, I don't advertise it, most of my MFP and RL friends know I have it. The bump on my chest is actually a huge motivation to me now because it is a constant reminder that life is too short to not enjoy it or take advantage of your body. Insanity was not easy to do for me because my pacemaker is under my left collar bone and my left arm is weaker than the right, those push-ups were hard! But like I said, I am stubborn so the harder it was the more determined I am to do it.

After that day I ran with my friends, I decided that I wanted to cross that 5K off my to-do list. I did that back in April of this year. I am still proud of my time of 31 minutes. I had a blast and that began my addiction to running! I talked my brother into running the next one with me. He did and he caught the running bug next. We ended up running one more before I talked him into training for a half marathon with me. I needed another goal and we were comparing our running experiences with each other. He ran with me once. I am 5'3 and he is 6 ft so it was pure torture for him to run with me so we still compare notes on our runs and push each other but we can't run together. We told ourselves that we wanted to see how much we improved from May (his first) to October when the local town had the small 5K. Well, I shaved 5 minutes off my time in that 5K. My time was 26 mins. It is a really hilly 5K so while that time may not seem impressive to runners, it really is a good time. I placed 3rd in my age group. Woot Woot! My brother placed 1st in his age group, super proud of him! Through the summer months, I had continued to cut my calories. I did not starve myself. My method was pretty simple, I set MFP above my BMR which is 1380 and ate back every single exercise calorie. I have a HRM so it was easy to calculate. As I got closer to my goal weight of 137 (this was the weight before I had kids), I upped my calories. I met the goal of 137 and decided that I wanted to see what 135 looked like, so I cut my calories again, I met that goal and am now trying for 130. The last time I stood on the scale I was 130.8. I am on maintence now and have been for about the last 2 months, I eat around 1710 calories as my base and still eat those exercise calories back. Through the whole process of losing 28 pounds, I have never felt hungry.

Now we can finally fast forward to this week… yesterday I ran my first ever half marathon. My official time was 1:58:09. It was an amazing experience. I have another one schedule for Nov. 11th. I posted the whole story of my half experience in my blog. Here's the link. http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/Colbyandsage/view/run-a-half-marathon-check-436973 I opened it up for the folks that are not my MFP friend. My goal was to finish a half marathon, I really wanted to get under that 2 hour mark but I told myself going into the race that I would be happy with 2:05. I cried when I crossed that finish line because I was so freaking proud of myself. There was no way that I could of ran a half marathon 2 years ago, and without the wake-up call of my pacemaker, I don't think I would of ever done it.

I guess the moral of my story is to never give up! I know that a lot of people on here have lost a ton of weight and some that have lost 20 or so. Everyone is an inspiration that puts their mind to something and does it. I hear all the time from my friends here that I am an inspiration, I really don't think I am, I am just a mom of 2 that decided enough was enough when her pants felt tights and made the time to take care of herself first. I found one thing, running, that I love to do. Running is my Zen. I have a high stress job and running seriously keeps me sane!

If you made it this far down the story, thank u for reading. It took a lot for me to write this but I did it with hopes that it will inspire at least one person.

To make it official, here are some pics…

This is me and my son. I was around 155 in this picture, it was not my heaviest but I felt really uncomfortable in my own skin at this point.



This is me around 135.



This is my brother and I after we finished our half. Not my favorite picture since you can see how exhausted I am but I love it anyway.



I can't believe that I forgot to thank MFP friends! Without you, I couldn't of done this. You have picked me up when all I really wanted to do was cry or whine. THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I have not only learned so much from you but I feel like I really know most of you. So if there is anyone out there just starting out, add some friends and create a MFP support group. I have a few friends on here that someday I hope to meet in real life just so I can say thank u in person! :flowerforyou: