Fathlete: the triumphs and tragedies of training with TNT in the Bay Area - A Prologue

Fathlete: Billy b

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Fathlete: the triumphs and tragedies of training with TNT in the Bay Area

King says write what you know.  As much as I want to spin tales about cops on the verge of break downs, who chase the worst of the worst serial killers, or space epics like a cross between firefly and star wars, I don't know that yet.  What I do know is what happened on every Saturday morning form 2005 - 2012, I was part of a cause and a team.  I was for my part a fat endurance athlete that trained hard, ate hard, and tried to help stop a killer.   I know my grammar is shit.  I know editing is dicy at best.  However, I think the story will end up speaking for itself over time...  RG and I were speaking on the way to the train station yesterday I should pull together all the funny stories we have from over the years from my getting attacked by wild animals, to Dorothy driving RG and top speed with out her glasses at night and almost killing us, to other training shenanigans.  So, I say why not.  Unfortunately TNT has changed from when I joined it.  When I knew it and loved it.  I was really disappointed when I found out they wouldn't have a PG Sprint Tri Team and they they dropped BK again.  I think the Bay Area chapter was taken over by the SF one and we lost a portion of what made our chapter so great!  Anyway... so amidst the comedy here in as I write this hopefully, people will see what made is so great.  The people and the coaches that coached those people.   To truly capture the hijinks we will have to full disclosure and well nothing is to wrong to go in.  So... let's begin...  why not.



Prologue:

It was 2005 and the end of July during a hot summer in San Jose.  I was fat, not as fat as I would be before it was all said and done but fat, nonetheless.  I was out of shape.  I was tired of working out at the gym and all I really wanted to do was walk but I'll be honest in 2005 the last of my friends left California and I was officially alone out here.

Since 1999 I had my younger brother's bestie out here with me.  Ison was my kind of scoundrel.  He loved Star Wars.  He loved to get drunk.  He was a Cubs and Boilermaker fan.  Don't get me wrong he had shortcomings he didn't like X-files and he ran the Cheat play in NCAA Football on the PSII.  Stupid game had fixed the rush up the middle and the middle linebacker blitz up the middle.  However it had not answer for UGA and Jeremy Shockley bootlegging and running down field unimpeded.   It's almost as flawed as Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl.

However Ison was a Midwesterner at heart.  He wasn't a transient like me.  He needed to go back to the heartland.  To his friends and his family.  To a place where you good get value for a 300,000 house and still have a yard and god willing a pool.  He believed in the concept of seasons.  He was a college football fan even know Purdue's program was falling to pieces.  So he went.  I was glad for him and tempted to go too.  However I do what I always do I endured and who knew that would take on an entire new meaning.

I wanted to walk.  I wanted to hike.   I just wanted did want to work out in a gym anymore.  No more lunges.  No more squats.  No more burpees.  No more spending my free time in doors.  No more guitar, journal, or PSII.  None of it.  We wanted, no needed more out of life.

Also, I needed to get back in touch with my oldest and dearest friend.  The one who was always good to me?  The one that made me feel better.  Filled me with a sense of purpose.  Also, the only friend I've ever had that truly make me look better.  You have to remember at this point is just started to hang out either the likes of Long, tall, and ugly.  Also, the Beav was a good 8 months in the future.  So, I didn't have friend that made me look good like this one.   Like the one who turned me from a cracker ass white boy to a dark brown tint.  I speak of course of the one true source of light.  The sun.  Back then I spent no time out doors.  I'd forgotten how tan I would get playing in the sun.  I'd forgotten just how dark I was when in my natural environment of the sun.

I realize now perhaps that is one of the two biggest problems I had.  In my late teens and twenties.  It was just the food and strong drink.  No it was so much more.  I'd not only turned my back on the sun, but the water too.  I don't think I swam more than 200 yards from 1994 - 2007.  Hmmm it explains a lot.  Given up my two most comfortable arenas.   The sun and the pool, for what am I, if I'm not some cross between Apollo and Poseidon?  I'm Posollo!  Hey it's better Apeidon, right?  It would be three years still before I'd return to the pool.  Nine before I'd give my life to it, and realize that my salvation was to be measured in yards, and meters not pounds and inches.  However, as I often do I'm ahead of myself.

So, I wanted to walk.  However the question was how do you walk?  What's the right program?  Can I saunter and get a workout?  Or do I need to push myself to the limit?  Can I walk small walks through out the day?  Do I need to do big long walks all at once?  I had no clue.  The thought at the time never crossed my mind to go look at a bookstore.  Or Google walking for health or walk programs.  I don't know why, it just didn't.  Also, I just kept thinking I have to walk, so then I can run, because for some reason running means I'm healthy.  Running means I'm ready to go. In the back of my mind rattling around somewhere was the desire to do a marathon.

 At the time all I knew about marathons is my sister Rosie did them.  She was skinny and in shape.   She also did some non-sense called a triathlon.  Whatever in the fuck that was.  However I said I do one some day.

In the early 2000's Craigslist was used more for meeting loose women for one-night stands and a reading ground for serial killers.  I actually found several roommates through it. Some good.  Some bad.  God that Irish women whatever her name was, I hated her.  Kurt the dork was a good roommate.  I also sold the Malibill thru craigslist.  Found the house on lean avenue thru CL, the again that was before we got robbed.  Bastards!  It wasn't all bad back then.

So I came up with a plan, a simple genius plan.  I'd post on Craigslist to find a "walking buddy". Simple right?  I was looking for someone to walk with.  Nothing more and nothing less.  It would be simple.  People would rally to the post, we'd form a walking group and I would walk enough to run and boom is go from 360 to skinny runner over time!

My post was simple: "my name is Billy b.  I want a walking buddy!  Want to get outside and move and walk for health!  I'm a big dude.  I need to get in shape, so please reach out to me.  You can email me here or at wbburkle@yahoo.com"

Simple.  Easy!  Come to me walking buddies.

The first person to email was a girl.  She said she wanted to walk.  The. Asked if I was a boy or girl?  I wasn't sure why it mattered but I told her boy.  He response was confusing to me, oh she said we like that.  My boyfriend, and me did I want to get drinks?    I was like what the fuck?!   Why even respond?  Billy b is clearly a boy’s name.  And why would I want to get drinks when I am asking about going walking? However things just got stranger and stranger from there!

The next was a guy who said I sound nice and he'd really like to meet me for coffee or dinner?

The next email from a guy said I sounded really strong and could he get some pictures of me before we met?

The next also from a guy made some insinuation about me being a giver or a taker and also wanted pics.

I am not really sure what walking Buddy means on craigslist but apparently it is someone to just go walking with.   I still wonder what it was that I said that made people think I was looking for a causal connection rather than a work out friend.

I was discouraged.  A little angry and annoyed.  I wanted to walk, but didn't have anyone to walk with.  I asked some co-workers but they were busy.  My walks were limited to crossing First Street and the one lap around the giant field across the street and back at work.

One day I don't remember where I was in a cross-functional meeting, at lunch, or what but I was with my co-worker Tracy, who will always have a special place in my heart because looking back, if I'd not had this conversation, I probably wouldn't be in California writing this tail right now.  I was telling her and some others about walking buddies in craigslist and how all I got was dudes asking me for pictures.  I was seriously I just want to walk.  I wish I had someone to walk with.  She must have heard me; because a week later she came to me with an offer I couldn't refuse and would forever change the course of my history.

It was a Friday.  I had no plans for the weekend as usual and I was sitting in my cube when she popped by and asked me if I wanted to walk the Wharf to Wharf with her that Sunday because a friend of hers was with child and couldn't use her entry.  I was like what is a wharf to wharf.  She said a 10K.  In these days the K's I knew is what they hung with the Good Doc Goodwin was on the mound mid-cocaine bender whiffing people left and right.  So when she said 10K I thought it was some giant great distance that only true athletes could do.  I said it sounds great but I wasn't in shape.  She said it was a walk with bands and I could walk six miles, she'd stay with me.  She said I can either do this with her or go back to Craigslist and get propositioned by dudes.  It's six miles; she is like it's not that far.  It's a coupe of hours and you can stop and rest as often as you need to.  What else could I say but why not?  It sounded fun. She also told me she'd introduce me to some walkers, real walkers, and people from something she said were TNT'er:  whatever that was.  I was both excited and nervous.  Looking back now I realize how radically my life changed that weekend.  However from then till know it would be a non-stop process of redefining myself over and again.  This was my ground zero.  It was the change I had needed.

What I remember from my Wharf to Wharf is little to nothing of the actual event.  I remember having to get up early and sitting on the bench on a Sunday morning Campbell waiting for Tracy to come get me.  It was so early there was no one line up in front of Stacks.  Which is an absolute mind fuck for anyone who had ever been to Campbell on a Sunday morning.  I remember being super nervous.  Actually terrified.  I remember I wore my Wichita State Shockers hat, that's right I was WSU fan before it was cool, and my city of Bloomington Utilities shirt.  Mostly though I remember being part of
Something special and just how fun it was.

I still remember being shocked to get a t-short for finishing and a bandana.     That was cool.  I also remember Tracy talking to this big dude.  A really big dude who was surrounded by women, in purple shirts it was like he had his own purple clad harem.

Then I noticed there was not just a few purple clad women but rather an entire fucking legion of them.  They frightened me.  I'm not going to lie.  I was totally terrified of them.  Who where they.  What did they do?  What did they want?    Apparently they were from Team in Training or TNT.  They did something for someone and in turn TNT did something for athletes?

This would be the first of many and more interactions with them.  How could I have known that at the time?  It's one of those game changing moments.  Like Garçon dropping a pass in his hands in Super Bowl XLIV or Buckner letting the ball go thru his legs in 1986.  It's one of those things you'll never forgot.

I'll always remember my first interaction with Team in Training or TNT.  An organization that was committed to ending cancer and to the no named every man athlete.  Even in my case a fathlete, the 360 pound man who would find a life in there ranks, as well as do over 20 endurance events including 3 halves in three months and a double down at pacific grove.

This here is a collection of stories oft experience and some of the other experiences I saw first hand while
Trying to end cancer.  Though I firmly believe TNT in the Bay Area has lost its way, I'm still 100% believer in cause.  It's given me more than friends, and meddles; it's given me a family.

Perhaps thru these stories we can raise money for the cause and awareness that we had a special chapter dedicated the participant new or old and maybe just maybe we can find our way back there.

So, for the first time but not the last time in this patchwork of tales and words I will say "Go Team!"