A Rainbow of Rubicons

Got to love my friends and family. Got up early this morning and buggered off down the Taff Trail. Six miler, there and back. Felt good - currently seem to be obsessed with the Fiona Apple album "Extraordinary Machine", for which I both blame and thank my pal Mary - henceforth to be referred to till it really annoys here no longer as "Mary from Scotland", but rather "Mary the Pregnant". Extraordinary Machine has really good bouncy, catchy tunes on it and lyrics that probably mean quite a bit....if you can be bothered to sit and analyse them for at least a good solid hour. What I can tell you is that bouncy and catchy are your firends when re-introducing your body to the idea of walking six miles in the morning before it's wise or even technically awake. Practically danced some of the way.

Yes, that does look exactly as disturbing as you think it does (particularly since we established only yesterday that one of the things I really can't do is dance).

Got a text halfway down the Trail, from my pal Sian.
"Of course you're bloody dyspraxic!" It said. "I thought you knew!!"
I succinctly pointed out to her that never having heard the word or even the notion that it was "a thing" until Sue popped up in my inbox yesterday morning was perhaps a justifiable hindrance in knowing that it applied to me.

(I should of course at this point make it perfectly clear that no medical bugger of any description has said it applies to me. It's currently just a hypothesis that appears to make an awwwwful lot of sense to a lot of people who know me. Including me.)

"Oops," said Sian, succinctly. In a way, this was a case of payback being a bitch - many times in our teenage years, I'd let her know that some bloke or other was head over heels in love with her, and turn her world upside-down, and she'd wail "Why didn't you tell me soooner?!" And I'd have to fall back on the obvious truth - "So bloody obvious I couldn't imagine you didn't KNOW!"

So...as I say, payback. Bitch. Etc.

Got back home and d was still there - she was on a late shift today.
"Hey you," she said as I sat, panting on the sofa, gasping for air like a very-nearly-dead fish. "Looking slimmer today. I gave her a thumbs-up of thanks for her support, and carried on trying not to die.

As it turned out, the Nazi Scales agreed with her. Weigh-in today shows me at 18stone 6.75 - down three pounds on last week and ten pounds overall in the last seventeen days. Happy with that, and it puts me technically beneath a half mile-stone - 18st 7. There's very little sense of triumph to this at the moment though, because before I went crashing through the barrier, I always swore I'd pull back my re-appearing before it got as serious as being 18stone. I know this is entirely illogical and irrational, but for me, 18stone is the psychological dividing line between being a Disappearing Man that's quite high up, and being a Reappeared Man that's low. 18stone is my first Rubicon, if you like, so I won't be even vaguely triumphant till I see that first 17. Then it goes weird - while I'm in the 17stone region, it will feel sort of energised and proactively trying to get out of it. When I see a 16, I have a nasty feeling it will be very anti-climactic, because it sort of approaches a second Rubicon (Are you following any of this meandering through my mentality?). 16stone, for me, is that second Rubicon, because when I see a 15, I sort of stop being a Disappearing Man and start becoming a Potentially Healthy Man (Yes, technically, I'll still be more than four stone overweight, but I remember what it felt like to be able to move as freely and do as much as I could in the 15s, so that's simply how I think of it. 14s are slap bang in Potentially Healthy Man territory, and I'm not at all sure what happens when I reach 13s, because of course, I didn't the first time round. Jusssst about got to 14st 7, and then broke the spell - pretty much two years ago now. It's weird to think in temporal terms sometimes - I lost six stone in about 15 months, and it took me two years of yo-yoing to put four and a half of them back on. Still very much early days in this version of the fightback, but so far, two weeks in, everything's going in the right direction.

Tomorrow, as this morning, there will be early morning walking - though this time with Ma, round that park I mentioned - and evening biking. Onward, tot he first Rubicon. Can I see a 17 on the Nazi Scales before the end of March? Let's find out...