With ten days to go, it's time for the Final Countdown

Yesterday I stood at the front of the line in the Potbelly on the Rockefeller Center concourse and found they've recently added a new "BIGS" option to their menu, in which you can order a sandwich with 30% more meat. I know this was a recent addition to the menu because it didn't exist the last time I was in that Potbelly approximately 48 hours earlier.

I may have a problem.

I'm fine with that, though. Potbelly Sandwich works is a good combination of quality, cost and college-related nostalgia and does so with a relatively low number of calories. However, this "BIGS" option intrigued me. In my head I decided it was best to avoid it, but when I started to order this exchange occured:

Dave: "I'll have the roast beef on wheat with mushrooms."
Employee 1: "Would you like that BIG?"
Employee 2: "YEAH HE DOES!" (Saucy smirk that implies sexual intrigue, but is entirely about the sandwich.)
Dave: "No, I think I'll pass unfortunately."
Employee 2: "Oh come on, you know want the BIG one."
Dave: "I do, but my sister's wedding is in 11 days, so--"
Employees 1 and 2: "OH! OK, NEVER MIND!"

I wonder if that excuse would work in other situations. I'll have to test the theory. In any event, I've buried the lede a little bit like I always do, so let's get down to brass tacks. Low these past 200 days I have been eating differently, eating less, drinking less and exercising a shit ton more all in the name of looking decent in the few dozen photos I'll find myself in on just one of the (hopefully) thousands of days I've got left here. So far it's been going swimmingly, (no pun intended) though there have been fits and starts along the way and obstacles high and low. Oh, and some pretty unfortunate musical references, though one more is coming.

More visual evidence that no one looks good exercising

Oh yeah. That's me right there to the right, looking less like an athlete and more like a cramping sloth whose shorts are way too tight as I make the final turn at a 10K I ran this past weekend in the lovely Newport section of Jersey City. My friend Theresa took it upon herself to snap this shot of me passing the girl I was using as a pace-setter for the final mile and while I would have preferred she didn't share it with the outside world, such is life sometimes. There I am, dragging myself through the last half mile of the longest distance I had ever run with my noticeable green and yellow shoes that are far too snazzy for a man with my fashion sensibilities.

On the plus side, though, it's hard to lose me in a crowd.

So yes, a few weeks after I ran an actual organized race for the first time, I decided to test my mettle again by doubling the distance. This may not have been wise. After all, 6.2 miles, while not an insurmountable distance, was not something I had ever pushed myself to. In fact, I often opt for the elliptical rather than jogging outside these days because I know my ankles and knees have gotten somewhat balky and running on pavement for roughly an hour straight isn't really going to help that. What's more, when you get past three miles or so, it's wise to kind of train for these things and gradually improve your mile base rather than just throwing yourself into the fire. My training involved exactly one run of 5.5 miles a week earlier, which nearly killed me since I may (definitely did) have had too much to drink the night before.

But hey, when you've lost 40 pounds in five months, I suppose you take it upon yourself to prove just how physically fit you are by indulging in these feats of endurance. If you're lucky like I am, the result of this is, well, survival. Beyond surviving, if you can deal with the lingering pain for at least a little while you're ahead of the game. In my case that pain was pretty ever-present, as I could feel some nasty discomfort hitting my right hip about halfway through the race. Fortunately for me, that is gone now, but my legs were extremely stiff for the first 48 hours after the race and just now are starting to loosen up a bit on me. All of those aches made the fact that my shoe got soaked when I stepped in a puddle during the first half mile seem immaterial by comparison.

Running a race? Me? Really? Don't be ridiculous.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not fast. I never have been. I've come to terms with the fact that I never will be. As someone who has watched more than his fair share of sports both professionally and for fun, I know that athleticism is a physical characteristic that never leaves you. If you have it, you have it. And ladies and gentlemen, I don't have it.

That's fine. I've accepted my lack of velocity ever since I "ran" a mile for gym class at age 10 and clocked in at a robust 17:18. Granted, this is mostly due to the fact that I walked the entire thing with my friend Matt, but over the 17 years that have passed since I have not shown the predilection nor the aptitude for learning how to run one faster than that. And that's ok.

Of course, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I had, in fact, gotten faster. In high school when I "played" football -- there's a reason "played" is in quotes -- I ran a timed mile in 8:30, though I did weigh significantly more at the time. While I didn't time myself at any point, I did begin to run on a regular basis in college, sometimes as many as seven days a week, usually at a fair brisk pace and never indoors. Given that I went to school near Chicago, this was not a smart idea for approximately 11.5 months out of the year.

If you'd ever like to know what lake-effect snow in your face feels like in -20-degree weather, I'm happy to tell you. It isn't good.

But I never ran races. Never. I was not one of those people who trained for road races and became obsessed with collecting bibs, breaking their PRs or measuring my splits. In fact, I had never run a race before in my entire life, and while the idea of running a marathon was always an athletic achievement I had considered striving for, it's become extremely clear to me over the years that I'm far more interested in telling people I ran a marathon after the fact than I am in actually doing it. After all, why would I want to duplicate a feat that killed the first person to ever accomplish it? Seems somewhat counterintuitive when applied to my general goal of staying alive.

Chipotle, Glorious Chipotle

Brown rice. Black beans. Chicken. Sour cream. Cheese. A pile of hot sauce. It's simple really, and yet it brings a surprising amount of joy into our lives. After a while, however, we develop a dependency. It's just too delicious, too quick, too filling, and too easy not to. But the hardest part, always, is accepting and admitting you have a problem.

But here I am. My name is David. And I am addicted to Chipotle.

I accept this as a battle I am going to be waging for the rest of my life, myself against the zesty high-quality faux Mexican that I first discovered a decade ago in Evanston, Illinois. I have no choice but to accept this fight. I have won minor battles along the way of course, changing ingredients here or there. When my addiction went into full swing my regular order was a feisty combination of white rice, a double scoop of pinto beans, a double order of barbacoa, sour cream, cheese (with a little more if you can spare it, sir) and a bag of chips. Take a gander at the Chipotle corporate website and you'll see their nutrition calculator conservatively estimates that at a scant 1,830 calories and 73.5 grams of fat. That's roughly 150 calories more than my current diet allows per day.

I realized long ago that this had to be reformed and over the years the order has changed. The chips have long since been dropped, as has the tortilla for the lighter and more easily mixed bowl option. Brown rice is now the norm instead of white, ditto black beans for pinto and chicken for barbacoa -- and single servings at that. The current order comes in at a significantly trimmer 690 calories and 30 grams of fat, numbers that, really, aren't quite so bad for you in the grand scheme of an average day, particularly since it leaves you with nearly 1,000 calories to spend on breakfast and dinner.

As a result of those changes my addiction is manageable, and not particularly threatening at that, which is good since before I decided to start losing weight my Chipotle intake was operating at a pretty steady rate of one meal per week. This is what happens when there's three locations within a three-block radius of your office. But I have also realized that my regular visits to Chipotle are not just a hindrance to reaching my goals when I could indulge in significantly less fatty fare such as, say, tilapia, but it's also a crutch, one that I lean on to get my fat kid fix every seven days.

Well, I had to find a way to make it into less of a crutch and more of a walking stick. And so I decided many weeks ago that Chipotle was no longer in the diet rotation along with various lean aquatic animals and leafy greens. Not unless I had earned it anyway.

Sometimes the world is just against you

Let's be frank here, people. The holidays are a very trying time when it comes to the subject of weight loss. Late December is a gorge of eating, then there's New Year's Eve, then there's New Year's, then there's the inevitable heavy drinking involved when Northwestern wins its first bowl game in 64 years (Ed: Go Cats.) and combined with all of this is the fact that it's just so damn cold outside and you start thinking and extra layer or two of cellulite might not be the worst thing in the winter months.

You fight through that shit.

You need to push yourself through the easy exits so you can actually make some progress in losing weight -- or at least keep yourself in check while you pound down loads of empty calories. Fortunately, while I haven't made much progress in getting the number on my scale lower through this most dangerous time of the year, I've managed to keep myself from going too overboard. However, now it's time to take a deep breath and focus. The holidays are over, I'm in the clear, and with the exception of my grandmother's birthday next weekend and the Super Bowl, there is nary an eating holiday in sight for me until late March, when I enter a brutal stretch in which my family and Judaism force me to endure about 87 food-heavy celebrations in seven weeks. Yes, Passover and the birthdays of my uncle, mother, father and step-mother all fall within close proximity, which means before those days hit I need to get some serious work done. We're talking "be in the 180s by mid-March" work.

I didn't think that would be too hard since I've made pretty solid progress over the first six weeks of this stupendous journey, but right as I walked into the gym on Jan. 2 to get my most pivotal period of weight-loss underwear I saw something on the door to the elliptical machine. It was that notice you see in the top right of this entry, a warning that if I should so much as dare to jump in the pool, I will not be allowed to for ten full days while it undergoes "annual routine maintenance."

Now that is some bullshit right there.