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").

Monday, June 10, 2013

H2G2!

I was going to blog about a girl sitting in a cafe in Rickmansworth, but today's entry is not her story. Today is the long-promised, wholly remarkable blog! If you're a fan of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2), you'll have caught the clever hints I've been dropping. Otherwise, this is just going to sound absurd. I'll wait til tomorrow to tell you why I'm doing such an unusual homage. For now, sit back and try to enjoy the crazy.

As the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom, you might expect the H2G2 to offer some insight into health and fitness.

1) Always bring your towel. It is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. You'll need it to dry yourself off after your morning workouts ... if it's clean enough.

2) Get your hands on a babelfish if you can. It would be really helpful early in the program when the trainers are throwing terms like burpies, mountain climbers, scissors, planks, wall sits, party trains, and so many more. You'll eventually learn to translate those foreign terms into torturous exercises, but until then the translating abilities of the babelfish will come in handy.

3) It's said that Vogon poetry is the third worst in the universe. The second worst is Grunthos the Flatulent of Kria. I've never seen Grunthos and Amber in the same room, and I suspect they may indeed be the same person. After all, listening to Amber count during planks is more painful than the Vogon poetry I've heard, but not as bad as that of Ms. Jennings.

4) When I'm doing Burpies, it feels like I'm trying to fly. You see, the secret to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. If you can accomplish that, then you're flying. We've yet to achieve flight, but we've certainly thrown ourselves at the floor often enough you'd think we'd at least levitate a little.

5) Humans apparently have an obsession with digital watches, which I didn't think included me ... until I got one with a heart rate monitor. Now I understand what the whole obsessed with digital watch thing. They are indeed very cool.

6) Don't panic! Whatever you do, don't think it's hopeless. You're capable of much more than you think you are.

So, why have I been looking forward to writing this blog? Because when I got to a certain amount of weight lost, I wanted to play off one of the more famous moments in H2G2. The people of Magrathea programmed a super computer named Deep Thought to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything. After running it's program for 7,500,000 years, Deep Thought came up with the ultimate answer ... 42. That's it.

This blog entry was going to celebrate the loss of 42 pounds. We weighed today, but I lost a little too much to make my goal of 42. This week was a 4.8 lb loss, which put me at 43.4 total pounds lost! I've waited all season long to make a reference to losing 42 pounds, and I skipped it. However, I figure Douglas Adams would say it's okay to go ahead and celebrate a 42 with a 43. I think it's just the kind of crazy he would have appreciated.

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