Nearing the end of Pennsylvania

Sometimes the ending is the worst part. That is how it seems to me right now. For the last few months, especially when it was cold, I have wanted this walk to be over. In fact I have said on numerous occasions that “I am over this walking thing.” But I have also said that I love the trip but the walking part is wearing a bit thin. Now that I am walking in spring and enjoying the places once again I find myself torn. On one hand I really want to get home to my family and a regular exercise and nutrition schedule. But on the other hand, there is still a lot of world to see. I fear that I have the wanderlust now.  

An offer has been made to sponsor me in a walk across England and a few suggestions about other places. One “media” person even suggested that I walk around the world. While these ideas do excite me, there is the practical to consider too. If I were to do something like continuing to walk then it would need to be in a more controlled manner. What I mean is that my walk across the country was done solo, without a support vehicle or system and I have had to contend with food and shelter on my own everyday. Finding good healthy food for someone with obvious food issues is very difficult, throw in some hardship and sleeping on the ground and it becomes an epic battle with the self. This has been a challenge that I have sometimes lost.

I have even said that walking across the country is not a good way to lose weight because of the difficulty involved, but it is an excellent way to rediscover your inner strength and to learn to deal with life’s adversities, which are the key to regaining control over yourself and subsequently your life. For me, walking across the country has been more about the difficulty in doing it than being about losing weight. It has been a struggle since the first day and resulted in me losing over 100lbs, but there are easier ways to do that.

What the trip really provided was a way for me to reconnect with myself emotionally, take responsibility for my condition and understand where the strength to carry on comes from. Without having done this walk I would never had learned these valuable things and would probably not have lost a pound over this last year. Walking is the exercise but life is the antagonist, balance between the two is where I have had the most success.

So before I could consider walking any further I would need to think about what is best for continued health improvement. It seems that I did much better at weightloss when I was in a regular environment and had a consistent healthy diet and exercise program. So in order for me to continue walking it would have to be in a fashion that allows for less survival oriented traveling and more of a structured health oriented plan. After expressing this, the talk has changed from walking around the world to walking in different places around the world.  Maybe a sponsored fatmanwalking 5, 10 or 15k walk in different cities to help promote the benefits of exercise and taking control of your life. Anyway, I am just telling you my ideas, whether this happens is actually not up to me. I will go wherever life takes me from here and be happy about having had the opportunities that this walk has provided for me so far. Everything else is a bonus.

Now for the details, considering the pace that I have been at and the route that I am taking, I am trying to get to NYC between the 8^th and 10^th of May. It looks as though I will make it by the 8^th if nothing goes wrong in this last week. So if you are planning on walking with me into NYC then get ready, let me know and we will meet up in Newark, May 7^th  and walk into NYC across the George Washington Bridge, then walk along a bike / walking path down to around 50^th street then cross over to Rockefeller Center which is my ending point. Thanks to the kind offer from The Today Show to host my finish. However, since they tape so early in the morning and the island is so long, I will finish at the Rockefeller Center and then continue onto the show the next morning. All those details are being worked out and will be settled before I get there.  I will continue to post my progress as often as I am able until my arrival.

See you in New York.

Alliance for a healthier generation

After all the talk about not going in for crazy fad diets I wound up doing exactly that and I am paying the price. The following stuff is creepy and has to do with body functions, so if that is gross then skip to the next paragraph.  About eight weeks ago I was really unhappy that the weight loss slowed down since returning to the road. To compensate for that I decided that I would change my diet a bit to help move things along and it worked. I reduced my carbohydrate intake significantly and increased protein. This was really helping for a while but then came the price to be paid for trying to shortcut nature. My body started to have problems digesting so much protein, my urine and sweat took on a strong ammonia smell and eventually I passed two kidney stones.

Ok gross part over—the end result of all this is that my Doctor told me that I would have to go back to a more balanced diet and stop being an idiot. (Maybe she didn’t use those words but I knew that was what she meant) So after weeks of abusing myself, I needed to revert back to the right way of eating and of course I gained back most of the weight that I had lost during the (Atkins time). I think that right now I am around 310 lbs. I have learned my lesson, unfortunately a lesson that I already knew, but I relearned it nonetheless. I am not stressing out over this though because I reminded myself that truly effective weightloss occurs a little bit at a time. Trying to force the body to lose weight is the same mania as is putting it on in the first place. I changed back to the proper way of eating and I increased the pace (out of scheduling necessity) and things seem to be heading back in the right direction now.

The temperature has gone up significantly and I have had to change my walking times accordingly, now I have someone walking with me most days and that helps too. So I will be buzzing right along and before you know it I will be in New York. To be honest, I am not so happy about that. On one hand I am thrilled knowing that I will see April and the kids in a couple of weeks, but on the other there is the end of an extraordinary adventure, a freedom that is difficult to describe. There are a lot of things on the horizon but this year has been incredible for me and I guess in some ways it is like losing a good friend.

Anyway, I promised to post more often this last “walking” week and there it is. I will post again tomorrow and talk about some of the characters that I have encountered this week. But for now I need to close, it is late and I get up really early tomorrow.

Oh yes, please check out the site at the top of this posting.  It is really a good site and I support what they are trying to achieve.

New Jersey

It is early in the morning as I write this, much earlier than I have become accustomed to over that last couple of months. But, because of the deadline for NYC I have decided that I need to split my day up to maximize walking time and that means getting up with the birds. For these last few days, I will walk in the am for at least 10 -12 miles and then try and match that mileage later in the afternoon after resting and allowing the day to cool down a bit. I have about 65 miles to go and this seems to be the best way for me to cover that distance in time.

My last pair of shoes for this journey is almost dead now but I am going to stick with them until the end; mostly because there is no place in rural New Jersey to buy shoes. This last push is going to be hard and I really need to have everything working perfectly but that is life isn’t it? I have been extremely lucky in that I only had one shoe mishap on this trip. That was in Arizona, in the middle of nowhere, and my shoe literally came apart. I was not carrying backups, opting instead to give that space over to water, so I was in sad shape. But then out of nowhere, not unlike the Calvary, Documentary Dave showed up to save the day. Why am I telling you all this? I have no idea; give me a break it is freakin’ too early for me. Oh yeah, because I find it ironic that my last miles into the city will be on worn out shoes. Ok that was much funnier in my head.

So, here I am in New Jersey, the scenery is beautiful and it smells incredible, springtime is a great time of the year. There has been a great reception for me by these folks here and their enthusiasm for my walk has been motivating. Yesterday, I met seven different people along the way yesterday and had a good time talking to them about my little adventure. I had the privilege of walking with Peter B. who came down from Connecticut (Thank goodness for spell check) to walk and talk for the day. It was great to have some company and we actually had a pretty good time. It was an interesting experience for Peter that gave him a chance to see a day in my life. I did an interview for the NY Post, was “guided” across the river and into New Jersey across a rickety old railroad bridge by a guy who had way too much to drink that morning, found out that New Jersey apparently has no “Yield for pedestrian” hang ups at all and Peter was almost consumed by a hoard of ravenous ticks. All in all a typical day lately.

One of the guys we met offered to give me a ride, which I politely turned him down but he was kind enough to take Peter back to PA to his car. Then, following his direction to a motel that was just “right up the road”, I walked another four miles until I found it, arriving well after dark. I was amused as I approached the office thinking about what a site it must be for a hotel clerk to see me walking up to the door from out of the darkness.

Now here I sit after a great nights sleep writing to you, ready to do it all over again. Its weird and great to consider how many different situations one finds himself in during the course of a day.

This is a great adventure for my family and I; it has been a great year of growth for us all. Now that the journey has transformed me into a different person, I look forward to everyday with almost childlike enthusiasm, I cannot wait to see where they day will take me. There is a lot of talk right now about walking around the world or doing smaller walks in different cities around the US and even different countries. I really like the idea of doing local Fatmanwalking 5 or 10k walks to help promote enthusiasm among obese people to get started on their journey. I am very excited about the possibilities because of how rewarding the experience has been for me. But there is my family to consider and after talking it over with them we decided that there is time for both. April and the kids are willing to allow me time to travel to accomplish these things, as long as I am not away a long time, like I have been during this walk. Short trips here and there are fine and they are even going to accompany me on a few of them. So it looks like the possibility for even more wanderlust is a strong one. I have a person named Melinda Cataldo helping me to coordinate everything and she has been a real asset. Without some one like her this all gets very overwhelming.

For those that are interested in being a part of this Fatman walking thing please contact Melinda and she will get it all worked out. I am looking forward to the possibilities.

These last days of the walk may prove to be the most interesting. The documentary guys, Dave and PJ, narrowly missed being thrown in jail for being miscreants; apparently the signs that said no photographs or video of the George Washington Bridge were serious. Then Dave had a little trouble with the New Jersey law, all he wanted to do was make a left turn, but he wound up on the wrong side of the street, in front of a police officer of course. The documentary crew getting locked up and missing my arrival in New York would be a great end to their movie I thought, oddly enough those two did not find the notion as amusing as I did.

J. Harry Jones and Eduardo Contreras, from the San Diego Union-Tribune are embedded media right now, they have been following me for the last two or three days, and there are swarms of other media in and out, my left ankle is bandaged up pretty tightly, there are no sidewalk or even enough room on the side of the road to walk, I am tired and I have been walking 15 miles a day steadily for I don’t even know how long. Two more days of walking and I will be there.

Every so often someone will ask me if I am excited about getting to New York and oddly enough I am not. It is actually kind of sad for me, because this last year has been an incredible one for me. I have grown physically and mentally, I have meet 1000’s of fascinating people, been places I would otherwise never have been and seen America in it rich and raw beauty. It feels like I have lived several years’ worth of life in the past one. To summarize, this has been the most interesting year of my life. I really wish that I could just turn and head in another direction now and see where the next road takes me. This time it would be without a route, I think that it would be incredible to just head in a new direction everyday just to see who and what is at the end of that road. There is so much beauty and glory along each road that if I walked for a lifetime I still could never see it all. And the greatest thing is that with every moment that passes the world reinvents itself. You will never be in the same place twice so in effect you can never finish a journey.

But right now I have a much more important road to take, one where the people along that road need to me as much as I need to see them. The road home, sometimes the longest road of all; my daughter and son have been waiting patiently a long time for me. So this next part will be there time.  But the road still calls.

Originally, I wanted to arrive on this day but it turns out that walking to NYC is a little more complicated than I first thought. There are security concerns to be considered and because of those the date was changed to the 9^th and the time was pushed back to the evening. The Today show wants to have a helicopter follow me across the George Washington Bridge and that needs to happen later in the day. This is a good thing for me because I have been walking so long without a break for the last few days that I am actually losing my stamina. Over the last couple of days my daily average is actually dropping by a mile or so a day, putting me behind and it really would be a push to make it by the 8^th anyway.

Today the local and international media was whipped up into a frenzy. Everyone is trying to get the facts straight for their stories and I always try to be accommodating because of that, but these last days that has been increasingly difficult. I am on a schedule and disregarding my own delay issues, the constant starting and stopping is putting me further behind.  The Today show has been out here in the mornings to catch me which has really helped to get me up at it early on. They are the most organized show I have dealt with and it really is not much trouble to deal with them. But the problem is with the other organizations. It is not that they are disorganized but rather that they are usually spur of the moment things. They come out and drive around to find me and when they do, they want to interview right there. One news crew almost caused a three car pile up because they stopped right in the middle of traffic to get a shot. I actually yelled out to them. I don’t want anyone to get killed for 20 seconds of video. So I stopped and did the interview. Then afterwards I went to a gas station to use the facilities and upon exiting I discovered that they had set up their cameras right outside of the bathroom door. Yikes!!!

At the end of the day I was mentally and physically exhausted. Have you ever heard someone tell the same joke a few times? And after about the third time you are saying in your head, will someone please shut this guy up already, well imagine that you are that guy, this is about the 100^th time that you have told the same story and you are also the one saying, someone shut him up please.....welcome to my world.

I sat with J. Harry Jones, Ricardo, Wally and the Beave (Otherwise known as the documentary guys, the hippies, the leftwingers, etc.) at an Outback steakhouse having an impromptu celebratory dinner. The people at the table had all inadvertently become friends because we all have been at this story from the beginning. They all have been with me on the road in one place or another and because of that we have shared some great times. Musing about those times it was interesting to note that because this might be the last time that we would ever be together like this again, there was an element of sadness present in everyone there......So that meant that J. Harry had to pick up the check.

New York

Morning of the arrival day; now I am getting excited. I have not been sleeping well my left foot is swollen and everyone is looking for me to say something profound and all I can think about is that in a few days I would be home with my two little homies, Melanie and Marc. By the way, we never intended to name them both with M’s, in fact that never occurred to us until long after Marc came along. Means nothing in the grand scheme of things but I just thought I’d point it out.

I decided that since there was going to be a ton of media along the way that I woul split the last nine miles into three segments giving the media time every hour to talk. Boy that never worked out. First there was the early morning Today show walk by. Then I got started after a couple of hours hanging with the doc crew for the last time. Once on the road all hell broke loose. I was walking along roads where one person could barely fit with four or five people in tow. At one point a photographer had taken up position right in the middle of a freeway off ramp, oblivious to the oncoming traffic. I had to yell to get him to move before he was hit. I decided then to walk even faster, most cameramen are not used to that and I thought I could lose them....nope.

So as I crested what turn out to be the last spectacular vista of the trip, a view of Manhattan, I really knew that I was there. There were a ton of photo ops there and I continued on. After a hill and a couple of turns I am ambushed by Inside Edition and as they were following me I was greeted by a bunch of kids that had poured out from their school onto the front lawn to cheer me on, Stopping periodically to get a “good background” or to answer a few questions, I actually missed a very important turn off. Route 46 becomes impassable up ahead and I needed to turn off and follow along side streets to get to Ft. Lee and the George Washington Bridge.

Now I am off course and I didn’t even know it. I missed my route turnoff because of the media and now I needed to ask a local, and that is usually not a good thing. It is amazing how many people there are that have no idea how to give directions. So I strolled into a broken-down tire store near Teaneck to ask. There was a guy there on the phone, speaking loudly and very animated, he was overwhelming the room. He was a cheap knockoff of Bada Bing, Bada boom. Telling his customer on the phone, just bring a blank check and a’ll figger it (the bill) out when ya get here. Don’t worry ‘bout it.

Watching him I was mesmerized by the fact that his teeth, jaw and lips all seemed to function independent of one another while he talked, and it was especially pronounced because he spoke out of the side of his mouth.

“What can I do you fa!” he asked. I tried to say that I needed some help with directions but he started before I finished, “yeah, that’s east and that’s west”. Obviously a clever boy! Once again I tried to speak, I told him that I was looking for Stephanic ave. He blurted out, “where you going?” To New York City I replied. “Yeah, then just foller 46 here and it will take you right into the city.” I replied, well that’s the problem, I can’t walk on Route 46 and I am trying to get around it. “Why don’t you just drive dere?” Walking dere is stupid.” Yes, thanks, I said, but I need to walk there. Can you tell me whether I have passed up Stefa—He interrupted, “if you don’t want to take 46 then you are going to have to go all the way around.” OK, I said, and where would that be? “No, no you just want to take 46” After a brief pause I said thanks, turned and walked out. Then he seemed to notice all the cameras and reporter following me and he came out to investigate. After talking to the reporter’s one of them came up and said to me, “this guy has directions for you.” So reluctantly I went back and the first thing out of his mouth was, “I was trying to tell you but you kept interrupting me, that’s because you are from California and youse guys are rude.” Well I had had enough of Tony Soprano lite so I turned and left. Turns out that the directions he had given the reporter were wrong anyway. Bada boom, bada bing!