A Fighters Blog #1

I had created a separate blog to chronicle my recent adventures in MMA as well as the journey that I had begun to lose weight, get in shape and start living the life that someone might want to read about, when I realized it was silly to manage two separate blogs. So I am just going to enter those entries under the Title of "A Fighters Blog". The following entries will be those I copied over, so here we go with the first entry.

In the begining:

I decided to start this blog as a diary of sorts to capture the journey I have been on for the last few months as I set out to get back in shape and start doing some of the things I always talked about doing but never did, but the story really started a lot longer ago. I had always been an athlete growing up I was always involved in a sport from 5 years old through the first 2 years of college. I was always a bigger guy, I played offensive line in football, but I was always in good if not great shape for someone my size, I was one of the few people I knew that could dunk a basketball and that was at 5'11 and 240 lbs. After I quit football in college I got into power lifting and body building and that is where my hunger and passion for working out was really ignited for the first time, I had always had to lift weights for sports but now I wanted to. After awhile I started getting interested in MMA and started taking classes with Pat Miletich, my goal was to compete in MMA fights and hopefully make a career at it. Well much like a lot of stories, one thing led to another and I quit working out, for me it was a combination of injuries, heartache from a love lost and the subsequent alcohol abuse. Over time I found my way back to the gym, but once again life got in the way and the obligations of work and a new family put my athletic adventures on the back burner. My weight and health over a period of 5 years spiraled out of control, the low points were the day I realized I was severely out of shape and when I had my first (and hopefully last) major health scare.

This is a photo I took on April 4th, 2009 1 week into my new workout weighing in at 289 lbs. At my highest I weighed 301 lbs back in Febuary. I look back at this photo and can't even believe I let myself get this out of shape.