Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Walking Away from the Darkness


Veteran suicides rates are higher than non-veteran in the United States and the highest percentage of suicides per age group is the 18-34-year old’s, according to the 2019 VA suicide report. But the highest number of suicides among veterans is the 55- 74. It may be hard to believe for some of you, I was close to becoming a statistic. What I did to change directions and what steps I took to walk away from the darkness. Here is my story…
Walking towards the darkness didn’t seem such a bad idea in the fall of 2016. The Great Recession had drained our savings and retirement nine years earlier, and it was a struggle keeping our heads above water for several years. As business slowly turned, paying off debt was a number one priority. No longer did we have the luxuries of the condo at the beach, exotic cars, boats and cruise vacations, it was a weekly struggle just to stay afloat. Turning sixty wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, I was still in pretty good shape and could hold my own on a building project. Things were starting to pick up, we were able to take a few small trips and invest in our business once again, another downturn in my construction business. My business wasn’t just bleeding cash, it was hemorrhaging. I looked over the profit and loss statement and the outstanding debt of unpaid invoices and paid out profits, (that should not have been paid out), I pulled the plug on the business. There I stood again with large debts and all my future efforts was to pay off debt once again, as the darkness loomed.
During my annual physical at the VA, I was shocked at the amount of weight I had gained from the year prior and the interview with the nurse wasn’t going well. My blood pressure was high, and they took it three additional times and the variance wasn’t much different from the first reading. As the doctor looked over the blood test results and explained my sugar was higher than it should be, my cholesterol reading was to high and I should start taking a statin drug to control it, and my blood pressure medication probably needed to be increased to bring in into healthy level. As I stared at the report, the one thing that stood out more than anything was the designation of my body content, the box marked obese. How did I let this happen? A heavy debt and now I’m obese, and at sixty-two years old, I could feel the darkness closing in.
 2016 was beginning to be the worst year of my life. It started out looking good with business coming in and by June, it started to unravel. My annual physical results lay heavy on my mind then difficulty with an aging parent and family influence and deception created additional mental pressures. By fall, a question lingered in my mind from my VA physical; have you ever considered harming yourself? I had never thought about it before, but I was considering it now. While mowing the yard on the riding lawn mower, I was developing a plan of what I needed to accomplish before I pulled the trigger. My plan was to have all the company debt paid off, have the house maintenance up to date, get my dress blues laid out with all the ribbons and accouterments polished and properly placed. I was going to walk into the backyard, call 911 and advise them of my address and where my body would be, hang up, and pull the trigger.  
As a combat veteran from Desert Storm, I had lost the fear of death. The one worry I had was not for me, it was for my wife. Communications were different then, if something would have happened to me, my wife would have had a knock on the door from a Chaplin and a survival officer standing on the other side. We have an extremely close relationship and the thought of her pain kept me in survival mode and now, the thought of her having a police officer knock on her office door would devastate her. I couldn’t bear laying that burden on her, there had to be another way to walk away from the darkness.
What really got me motivated was a picture of me. I had been lying to myself for years, I wasn’t in good shape and I had let myself go and it pissed me off and it was that anger that led me to taking those first steps away from the darkness. I started out with a fitness plan, one that had been suggested by a real estate trainer; two glasses of water and fifteen minutes of a vigorous exercise. My exercise started out with a two mile walk through our neighborhood. The first few weeks I was disgusted with myself with every step I took I could feel the fat around my waist flop and jiggle, and over the course of a month, the jiggle lightened up. I stepped on the scale and I had lost eight pounds, I was on my way.
The next choice I made was to change my diet. I had been suffering with acid reflux for several years and I was constantly eating antacids to control the heartburn. It wasn’t until I overdosed on fresh buttermilk biscuits that the real problem I was having, was with gluten. I stopped eating all gluten products and over the course of two weeks, I was thinking clearer, acid reflux was gone, and I had lost another ten pounds.
Over the next year, I was feeling stronger and I was down two pant size. I had started interval training with a combination of four quarter mile walks and three, quarter mile runs, and I was down another five pounds. The icing on the cake was when I found a good quality bicycle during a clean-out. I decided I would mix cycling with my interval training. The first day I rode my bike for two and a half miles and when I stopped, got off the bike, thank god I had the bike to hold me up as I walked the bike up the driveway to the garage. My legs were shaking so bad, I had to use the handrail to help me up the stairs into our home. Within a few weeks I was riding six miles, then eleven, then twenty and I got the bright idea, (after one to many glasses of wine), I was going to ride to the beach, an eighty-five-mile ride and I would do it for a charity. After just three months of riding, (after not having ridden a bike in forty years), on December 7th, 2018, a couple of friends joined me for the ride to the beach. It took us eight and half hours for the ride and I was worn out. We made the same trip again three months later and it took us six hours this time. It was during that trip while we were all sitting around the dinner table where we were talking about running, 5K’s and half marathons. It was after an additional glass of wine I told my wife I was going to run a half marathon that fall. I trained all through the summer and on October 20th, 2019, I ran my first half marathon in two hours, eleven minutes. I finished 125th out of over two thousand runners and took 3rd place for my age group. Two months later, I participated in a 100K bike race and finished in the top twenty in my class.
The point of this story is; mental fitness and physical fitness go hand in hand. If you want to become physically fit, you can do it at any age. You just have to make that decision yourself and stick with it.  There will be changes in your eating habits, there will be people along the way to coach you or assist you with your training. You don’t have to run a half marathon or do a 100K bike ride but you will have to write down your goals and create target dates.  Your physical fitness starts just like mine did; two glasses of water and fifteen minutes of vigorous exercise.
  



My First half Marathon

My 100K Bike Race

The before of me 


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