Change in Habits

I'm signed up for the Lake Minnetonka Triathlon in June.  .5 miles of swimming, 15 miles of bicycling, 3 miles of "sprinting" (yeah, right).  Not a very ambitious triathlon, but my first and probably my last.  My toes have never recovered from the last time I trained for a triathlon in 2001, right before my sister's wedding.  Since then lots of running makes them radiate pain across the tops of my feet and up my ankles.  I didn't learn until a few months ago that it even had a name, Hallux Rigidus.  The doc I saw back in 2001 told me it was simply a lack of cartilage in the toes and that was good enough for me.  End of running.  End of tennis.  End of basketball.  Anything that flexed the toe.  Bicycling was still good because your foot stays pretty flat the whole time, particularly in bicycle shoes. Although I'm more likely to wear tennis shoes, but they still stay pretty flat.

So training is important, but I feel the most important thing I can do to get myself ready for this thing is lose 40 pounds.  That's a lot.  I haven't weighed that little since I first started dating my wife.  But that would take at least some of the pressure off my feet.  I'm a bit nervous about committing to that sort of a weight loss. My lifestyle doesn't do much to drive me toward good eating and healthy living.  My habits include my job in an office (glorified cube), fun on the internet (currently learning PHP with some some stylesheet work, scripting, HTML5/CSS3, and Objective C, plus coding up a Java app), and (sort of) playing the guitar.  If I didn't climb on my bicycle every now and then, walking the dog would be my primary exercise.

But I'm down about 14 pounds in three weeks (fluctuating, I suspect because of the bicycling), and I've managed to develop better eating habits that don't preclude beer or scotch.  So the direction is good, and I can now worry about how my tendency for being cheap will keep me out of a gym pool as I wait for the lakes to be warm enough to train in.