Chuck and his Bike

My Name is Chuck Gough. I am new to blogging and this is my first attempt at building my own website. So I am learning as a go along. Tom has been a mentor to me in the process.

I am almost 54 years old. My wife and I just celebrated out 34th wedding anniversary. We have two grown children and 3 grandchildren who are the twinkle in my eye. On July 20th, 2009 I had a Gastric Bypass in an effort to change my life for the good and lead a healthier life. Before my surgery I was on 14 different medications and had to use a cane to get around about 50 percent of the time. My max weight was some place over 330+ pounds. My scale topped out there. Once at my doctor’s office I weighed in at 338 pounds. So I figured minus a few pounds for clothes I was 335.

From the time I decided to turn my life around and started to work on my weight which includes the surgery I have lost roughly 135 pounds. I hover around 200 pounds now plus or minus a few pounds. The lowest weight I have been is 189.

As far as changing my life? I now only take one medicine for a thyroid condition. I was insulin dependent diabetic and no longer am I diabetic. My Blood pressure, cholesterol and triglycerides are like a high school kids my doctor says. I had bad Gerd before the surgery and no longer have it now.

I always loved walking even when I was heavy yet I had a lot of problems doing so. Once I had the weight off I decided to start jogging some. Before long I found myself getting a competitive spirit in me that I had not had since I was in my teens and early twenties. Around March of 2010 I signed up for my first 5k and realized I was hooked on running. I started running 5K’s every weekend and then jumped up and ran a few 10K races. I started to think about maybe running a half marathon by the end of the year. As fate had it though I met a few people and one thing led to another and I thought that maybe just maybe I could run a Marathon only a year out of surgery. So on the 25th of September 2010 after a long hard summer and 4 months of training I ran and completed my first full marathon. I am now training to run my second one in May of 2011 and will run my 3rd on the 24th of September of this year.

I hope to convey some of my feelings about my experience of running my first marathon and what I learned in this website, how it affect’s my outlook on things and how this has given me a more positive outlook on life in general. I hope also to convey the highs and lows of training and how they can correlate to everyday life.  I hope to take this experience to press for an even loftier goal of completing a multi state bike ride over the coarse of a week to ten days.  

Which brings me to the other part of whom I am.

Another passion I have is biking. For many years my balance was so bad I wouldn’t even think abut riding a bike let alone be healthy enough to ride one. Before my surgery after I lost a few pounds and then after I became very active and an avid Biker as well.  I found that biking and running complement each other well.  Last year I had plans to go on a week long Bike Trip called GOBA (Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure) which was a supported ride through southeast Ohio. Unfortunately I fell off my bike and broke my thumb and tore a tendon off the bone In April and had to cancel my trip. I had to have surgery which severely limited my riding the rest of the summer as well.

I had always dreamed of making a cross country trip on my bike and supporting myself and carrying all the gear. A bike tour.  So this year instead of riding the GOBA I decided to look for a different ride I could put together on my own.  Tom and I were going over our first half season schedule fore or cycling club and we had spoken about doing parts of the GAP (Great Allegany Passage) before. Tom had a trail book for it and it described how it connects to the C&O Canal path. After thinking about if for a few hours I decided that was the ticket for me. I asked Tom if he would like to go also and we decided that we would take about 10 days and hopefully get from Pittsburgh, by way of Cumberland Maryland through Washington DC to the Chesapeake Bay and Annapolis.

We will be starting out the last week of June to pursue what I consider and adventure of a lifetime. I have dreamt of doing something like this for many years but only after my surgery and weight loss could I consider something like this. To have a dream and then to be able to pursue the dream is a whole new level of living life for me…..Oh how great it is. 

Chuck