Welcome


Thoughts on fitness, health, good nutrition ... and running.


Welcome to Bald Man Running, a blog launched by Frank Murphy on January 1, 2015.

In March, 2013 I was selected as a contestant for the sixth season of Fort Wayne's Smallest Winner. Through this amazing program, I learned about good nutrition, sound exercise and accountability. By October, I would lose over 88 pounds (almost 37% of my original weight)! One of the many things I acquired through FWSW was a love for running. You can retrace my weight loss journey and discover how I became a runner by reading those entries labeled "fwsw" ...

Note: Many of the blog entries on this website predate 1/1/2015. Prior to launching BMR, I had written articles for various projects, and I have imported many of them into this blog (labeled "retro").

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Nearly Amish

After work on Friday, I went straight to Spiece and did my workout (it was a great workout, by the way). When I got home, my wife informed me that our plumbing was out of whack. It was backing up into the bathtub and had spilled into an adjacent room and flooded several square yards of carpet. The plumber was at our house for about three hours trying to fix it. Turns out we're going to need just shy of $1000 to fix the problem.

Because it's the holiday weekend, we can't get a hold of the proper authorities to mark lines in the yard so an excavator can come dig down to our pipes so the plumbers can do their stuff. My kids have commented that it feels a bit Amish to be on tight water rations. Washing dishes in tubs, going to the neighborhood laundry mat, and showering at Spiece wasn't exactly our first choice for holiday fun. So far, we're taking it in stride and it's not been nearly as frustrating as you might suspect.

What does this have to do with FWSW? Well, our health insurer has a program where overweight folks are given an incentive to lose weight. If you lose 10% of your body weight, they'll give you $500. That's a nice incentive. My wife and I have just recently crossed that threshold and filed the paperwork to get our reward. Nice, eh? $1000 for losing weight ...

Can you see where I'm going with this? All that weight we've lost so far is actually going to fund our new and improved plumbing. That's a lot of money and had we not received this windfall, it would have been difficult to come up with that much cash on short notice. Now, I was hoping to do something else with that money, but instead I'll almost literally flush it down the toilet. As long as it doesn't came back up into the bathtub, we'll be just fine.

One more thing ... so far in this blog I've given thanks to my wife, family, friends, coworkers, mentor, trainers, nutritionists, etc. I sincerely and greatly appreciate all they've done so far; however, there is someone I've neglected to publicly thank or acknowledge. I feel stupid for having waited this long to say something, so I'll correct it right now. Thank You, God for bringing me through this program so far and I know I couldn't have done it without You.

In His providence, God provided me not only with a much healthier lifestyle, a thinner waist, and great new friends through FWSW, but He used all of those things to meet an unexpected expense. This would have been a huge problem for us, but it's truly a blessing. It cracks me up to think that God allowed us to pay for these repairs with our own fat. Rick has said, "sweat is my fat crying." I offer this corollary: "a working toilet is my fat saying, 'I paid for this!'" I hope that every time I flush my new working toilet (Wednesday!), I will briefly pause to remember that I know an awesome God.

No comments:

Post a Comment