The Grand Plan

Late last year, in a smokey room full of seasoned diplomats, a grand plan was hatched. This is what it looked like:
  

OK, this is really a famous pic from the Yalta Conference in 1945.

The grand plan was for a blogger meetup at the Chicago Marathon in 2013. Myself, Roseanne and a few others were going to join together in Chicago to run a marathon, my first ever full marathon, and try not to pass out doing it. Well plans changed. Timing and money came into play (let's just say Chicago is expensive), and "The Plan" changed.

The new plan has Roseanne and I running the Detroit Marathon together. The hometown favorite comes through again. Also, realize, when I say "together" I mean Roseanne will finish waaaaaaaaaay ahead of me and then offer moral and GU support.

As I am not a solo operation, and am part of a family consisting of CE and The Wife, it was a good idea to run this idea by The Wife. Lets just say that she was a mite bit skeptical. Honestly, I understand where she is coming from, and I might even be a little skeptical of myself. Making a logical argument against me running a marathon is really easy. It goes something like this:

1. I am too fat, as in 278lbs fat.
2. I have never run a full marathon before, and training for half marathons has been a challenge in the past.
3. It will be a challenge to carve out the time needed for training, putting a heavy burden on my wife to be a solo parent while I am out running.
4. Did I mention that I fall handily into the category of society called "obese." Obese people do not run marathons.
5. 278 lbs.... I mean lay off the Doritos already.

So, me being the bullheaded person that I am, decided to come up with a plan to run the marathon. The Wife would have to agree to this plan. It was called "Operation: Parvum Corpus." Thanks Google translate for making me sound smart.

Here are the main points of "The Plan":

1.  I am not able to register for the marathon until two criteria have been fulfilled. The first is that I get under 265lbs and hold it for two weeks. The second is that I go to a doctor and get an EKG of my heart to make sure I am in good enough cardio shape to run a marathon. 
2. I will be participating in the "Running 501" class at Running Fit in Northville. This class will meet twice a week, June through October to run and go over topics that are relevant to training for a long race.
3. I sill start tracking all my eating and exercise on www.myfooddiary.com. The idea being I will make better choices if I have better information.
3. I will not be able to run the marathon unless on race day I am under 250lbs.

So, with these criteria in front of me, I readily agreed to the plan. I am happy to report that I am already down to 273.8 lbs and hope to be under 265 by the end of May. So here is to Detroit, and to convincing my body that 26.2 miles is really just a long 10k!

A couple of observations about this post:

1. There are a lot of lists in this post
2. It was surprisingly hard to write your actual weight on the internet for all to see.
3. I am pretty confident that I will be able to meet the plan requirements and will run the marathon.  Keep checking back for updates.