Crazy right! That's your boy BENCHING and REPPING 225!!! That was taken around May 2007.
Back then, I pretty much ate any and everything. That's okonomiyaki being consumed whole....plastic wrapping and all. :-p [2008]
Two of my closest friends in grad school. Again, the theme is eating and steak. Not so much the veggies as you can see. [2008]
That was a 'daily' meal for me when I first moved to Hawaii. Steak, onions, rice, and poke. [2008]
Picking up right where we left off...
So here I am, all done with PTSD from my experience at the LSE - a good one, no doubt - and I come back to Brown for my final year. Interestingly, I really REALLY got into weight lifting and lifted regularly with a good friend who was an MD student at the time. Also at this time, I translated my semi-monk like lifestyle from London to Provdience, RI. You could basically map where I was by trying to call me. How? Well here was my weekday:
1) Get up
2) Class
3) Library
4) Class
5) CIT - this is the nerd location from Brown comp sci majors. An odd and yet comfortable place.
6) The gym
7) Dinner
8) Library
9) Everybody Loves Raymond.
Put that on repeat 1 and you've got me down to a tee! Weight lifting was fun and Ian and I would knock out some insane reps - he, of course, was much stronger than me. I enjoyed my time weight lifting and playing the occassional game of hoops. The highlight of this time came when I was able to benchpress 225 - AKA: deuce-duece-five! - 3 times. That officially makes me stronger than Matt Leinart and technically able to date Paris Hilton [assuming I turned into a flaming dbag]. Diet was meh...but I started eating less carbs and desiring six-pack abs. Bring back the milk, eggs, and animal protein - not like they had left my life anyways.
Weight: 165 lbs
Thinking about the next steps...I thought it best to go right on through to Graduate school. And so my test scores and grades to me to the Owen Graduate School of Management [you can read my story @ http://www.owenworldshapers.com/]. Business school was AWESOME and I loved my time in Nashville, TN...I was taking advanced Japanese, crazy b-school topics such as derivative valuations and risk management, playing golf 2 days a week [in b-school, fridays are always OFF] and eating the finest bbq around. Man, did my weight balloon after that. I ate my way up to 170 lbs and stopped going to the gym and running in general. 8 oz curls with beer became my form of recreation and I had a good set of jaws from all the bbq and johnnycakes I was consuming. Man it was good. There was this one place, I must have gotten take out from there at least twice a week. Each time the same thing: pulled pork sandwich with spicy ranch sauce and tots. Wow. Despite all of this reckless eating, my school work got much better and I was able to secure solid employment for a bank in Hawaii. That was at the end of May 2008. I dreamt of fast cars, fast girls and fast money. Indeed, that's the dream of many youngsters fresh out of college and especially out of b-school. It was all about who was working where, was it a big firm or chump change, was the job in finance or in marketing? Such meaningless labels and topics that I'm ashamed to say I gave a damn about.
I went to Hawaii and proceeded to buy up aloha shirts of all flavors in size M. Through the drinking and eating, I worked myself back up to my 'normal' overweight weight of 185 lbs at the end of summer 2008. I was miserable and looked awful. My chubby cheeks showed how much sushi I was eating and at the time, my recycle bin was jammed full of Opus One. Cycling and running were things I had never considered. Heck, doing something outside of watching TV, sleeping, eating and working were totally foreign to me. I have the feeling this is a sad reality for many youngsters like I was 'back then'. My advice: find something outside of work that you're intensely obsessive about...something you can create a goal for - be it learning to bake, cook, kendo, learn a language, etc. I realize that people have different jobs and work hard however, I soon found out I was living to work rather than working to live. At which point, the most profound and deeply moving point in my adult life came upon me...and I grabbed it by the reigns and drove forward [ahem...that's what she...].
...but that's part 4 I suppose and you'll just have to wait on that. :-)
Keep it safe this weekend. I'm racing la biccicleta both days and they're all crits. Yuck. But I need to build some form for my time trials coming up.
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