Escaping the Couch

By Rance Durfee

A simple and straightforward account of how the author was able to move from being a common couch potato to completing his first marathon, losing over 100 pounds, and more! No "expert" promises are given. Just simple observations and suggestions that were gleaned during the journey to become more fit through running, better decisions, and small victories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365614484

Book preview

Escaping the Couch

Escaping the Couch

Working from fatness to fitness

(Well, working out of less fatness anyway)

By Rance Durfee

Introduction

Ok.  Let’s get some of the obvious preconceptions & misconceptions out of the way.  I am no super-athlete. Nope.  Not even close. In fact I would hardly classify myself as an athlete at all.  I’ve never won championship trophies or medals for any kind of sport or athletic event. It is also highly improbable that I would ever win any kind of athletic accolade that would result in high-profile million dollar contracts for product endorsement or sponsorship. So if you’re looking for some kind of super slick and flashy advice or endorsement from a world-class athlete then I’m afraid that you have simply purchased the wrong book.

To further my extensive laundry list of disqualifications you should also know that I do not possess, in any way, the Greek god-like physique commonly paraded in the media.  There is an absolute probably of zero that I would ever be mistaken as a paragon of physical fitness with the hard and chiseled features make so many people green with envy.  Nor are you likely to ever see me gracing the cover of some hardcore magazine trying to convince you that you can have huge muscles or ripped body parts by simply following my ultra-secret physical fitness regimen which promises grandiose results and only requiring minimal effort a few minutes every day.  Nor am I likely to provide you with an unrealistic beast work-out program which demands several hours per day of activity intense enough to make you seriously reconsider your goals in the first place.

Finally, I am not some kind of mad fitness scientist or expert who boasts of advanced degrees that you can barely pronounce and making claims that I’ve discovered some kind of scientific breakthrough formula promising miraculous results within a very short period of time.  There will be no bold proclamation of a simple and easy trick that will somehow magically transform your body overnight with little to no effort.  No scientifically engineered program offering a proven roadmap to supreme and optimized fitness levels.

So by now you are probably thinking to yourself (hopefully not out loud), "Who the fr@#k is this guy and what makes him think that he can lecture me about fitness?"  Me???  I imagine that I was like many of you.  Overweight.  Inactive.  Ensconced and enslaved to my couch and surrendering to the easy and seductive path of mindless consumption of convenient garbage.  I would sit on that couch and watch a constant barrage of beautiful athletes and celebrities who seemed to have perfect bodies with very little effort and think about how unfair it all seemed.  After all, didn’t it look like they could do or eat whatever they wanted and not really gain any weight?  Meanwhile, sometimes it seemed like just watching ads of my favorite junk foods made me feel like I was gaining weight as if my some form of subliminal digital osmosis!  In the end I not only envied them but begin to loathe the person that I’d allowed myself to become.  Somehow that subtly insidious couch had served to slowly and quietly lull me into an unsaid acceptance of my condition.

Obviously, my condition couldn’t legitimately be blamed on the couch itself.  (Although I was certainly willing to try.)  The physical representation of my self-imposed enslavement, the couch, was simply representative of how I had allowed personal comfort zones and bad habits to mold me into my presently undesirable shape.  Eventually I came to the realization that if these corrupting forces had worked me into my undesirable physical Budai-like state then by a concerted and conscious effort I should be able to foster the forces and habits that would cultivate the body