A Few Adventures from This Week

This past week started off busy in preparation to get caught up before Thanksgiving. I had a few clients to get portraits to and put last minute finishing touches on before I sent them out. I also picked up a few extra shifts at the hospital to earn some extra money for the biggest spending time of the year, AKA Christmas.

So on Tuesday, during my edits, I skipped out of the house to get a few errands done. I ran up to Fleet Feet to get our race packets for the Turkey Trot St. Louis and then I ran next door to Great Harvest Bread Co. to get a sandwich and a yummy loaf of bread.

Turkey Trot St. Louis:

This is our first year doing a Thanksgiving race. I have always wanted to do one, but I was either working or too tired to get myself outta bed to go to the race. I also didn’t plan ahead enough to register for the race. This year was different, this year My Wife and I decided that it would be fun to do a Thanksgiving race. We are going to take it easy and walk the whole thing but I’m still excited to be out there none-the-less.

I’m not sure if the race has ever been in St. Charles, but this year it is and I’m glad because its alot closer to home. Due to all the unrest in Ferguson, the Thanksgiving festivities in downtown St. Louis have been postponed. You can read about it here: St. Louis Thanksgiving Day parade is postponed due to Ferguson unrest : News. The fact that things have gotten this out of hand is ridiculous, but I digress. In years past, I haven’t wanted to drive to downtown for a morning race, but it being in St. Charles makes things alot easier. I’ve read that Thanksgiving is the busiest race day of the year. It makes sense because its a great way to start the day in preparation for all the food you will be consuming that day. This was one of the main reasons that My Wife and I are doing this race. I have to say, I’m rather excited about it.

One of the errands that I made yesterday was to pick up mine and My Wife’s swag for the race. She got a shirt and I got a stocking cap or as they call it a beanie. I’ll write more about the race after we’ve completed it.

After picking up our race packets from Fleet Feet, I walked adjacent to Great Harvest Bread Co. for a sandwich and picked up a loaf of bread. Great Harvest Bread Co. has been around a while but it has grown in popularity over the past few years. When I went in there, it was packed. The space that they have isn’t really large, but it has a few tables to eat at and racks of bread for sale along with locally made chips and soup mixes. They basically have a lot of homemade-type foods and of course breads, as the name suggests. Their sandwiches are made on their homemade breads, I usually get the Farmhand, which is a little bit of everything meat, cheese, etc. They have samples of their breads so you can try before you buy. I picked up a bread called Stuffing Bread. Think Thanksgiving stuffing made into bread loaf. YUM! And they make a bread loaf into a turkey just for fun! I think you take the top of the turkey off and put dip in the center of the feathers and then dip the bread in the dip kinda like rye and dill dip (my mom makes it for parties.)

Thanks for reading and have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

A Few Adventures from Last Week

This week has been a bit of a busy blur, but I was able to fit in a few fun things in. Ready. Set. Go.

1) Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a huge Disney fan. So is my wife. There are times that we rival each other in how much we are Disney fans but for the most part, I usually win. Anyway, this week was opening week for Disney's new movie Big Hero 6.

**Images from @DisneyPictures

We saw the movie with some friends that we hadn't seen in a few months. It was really good to reconnect.

The movie was really good. We laughed and even cried. I'll be honest I'm a crier when it comes to movies. I don't cry at the typical girl movies like where the guy gets the girl or something like that but when it comes to the main character overcoming emotional obstacles or losing a loved one and really grieving and then rising to a challenge then I probably will cry and emotional music never helps. :-)

Ok back to the movie night with friends. We started our evening at Panera Bread. They have these BBQ Chicken Flatbread sandwiches and they are Sooo good. (I wish old have gotten a picture of it but I failed to do so. Next time I go I'll take one.) After dinner we walked in the cold to the movie theater. Fortunately, we only had to walk across the parking lot. We almost didn't get to see the movie because of projector problems but fortunately by the time we got there it was fixed.

After the movie my wife and I wanted to get pictures with the inflatable Baymax character in the movie theater lobby.

2) The next morning we had breakfast at a quaint little cafe in with a friend of mine from Novosibirsk, Russia. I met him in 2010 during a mission trip to Novosibirsk. A little background on why I went to Russia on a mission trip.

I went with an organization called Youth Reach International. They are an organization that works with orphans in Novosibirsk, Russia and Belarus. To be an orphan in Russia is to be labelled less than a third-class citizen and/or handicapped. The thing is, none of these kids did anything to deserve this status label. Some of these kids are products of orphans and some aren’t orphans in the traditional sense as in their parents passed away, but they are orphans because one or both of their parents are in the prison system for one reason or another. The problem is several fold. These kids are brought up to believe that they are basically worthless and have no value what-so-ever. This causes them to spiral into destructive behaviors and believe the lies that they have been told.

10% of Russian orphans will commit suicide

40% of Russian orphans will turn to drugs and/or alcohol

60% of Russian orphans will be jobless and homeless

Given the fact that these orphans are released into society at the age of 16, consider that 86% of the people (in the entire world, not only the former Soviet Union) who accept Christ do so prior to the age of 14.

The trip was so expensive that I had to raise support for it. It was the most humbling experience that I have ever done because I am the type of person that doesn’t really like to ask for help or ask for money or anything for that matter. This was very hard for me to do and the best part was that God was very awesome in blessing me and it was so awesome to see people giving. I’ll admit that I was in a really rough spot during this time and I was not very good at letting those who gave me support know what happened or how things went. If you would like to read my support letter please follow this link you can also see the photo card that I included with every support letter.

As a brief summary of what we did while we were there, we met with daily with the orphans at St. Nicholas Orphanage along with the mentors. Mentors are Russian young adults, usually college age, who have either grown up as orphans and were impacted by the YouthReach program or people that have a heart to help orphans. These mentors are key in impacting the lives of the Russian youth. Basically you can think of it as a Big Brothers and Big Sisters program for Russia.


If they have that program, then why did I go over? Well, good question! Americans are a novelty. We go over to Russia to aid in the continued relationship between mentor and orphan or help one get started. For a week myself and the team that I was with, would have craft sessions and story time and sharing of stories and experiences, which was VERY hard to understand as I don’t really speak Russian. The week went by fast and the last day we all gathered for a group picture. It was sad to go and Russians have a special place in my heart.

When I got home, I needed to do something. After being impacted like I was I couldn’t just sit by and do nothing. So I decided to support my friend Ruslan. He is the Director of Russian Operations and now oversees the new operations in Belarus. This week he was in town visiting friends and supporters. My wife and I met him for breakfast. We heard all about what is going on in Russia and had a great time catching up as well.

I’m also including a slideshow of pics from my trip to Russia.
Please note this slideshow does not work on iOS devices such as Apple iPhone or iPad. To view the photos in the gallery please follow THIS LINK HERE .

Getting Back on Track

Its been a while since I wrote in this blog. I had been wanting to update on my running and weight loss but there was nothing to update. I hadn’t been at all successful in getting anything done, at least not consistently. So I haven’t wanted to write anything as I feel like I’m extremely hypocritical even having this blog.

If I have a blog about exercise and weight loss and don’t do anything to get myself towards weight loss, then how can I write a blog about weight loss or my fitness adventures. Blogging for me has always been a love-hate relationship. I love the idea of a blog and I hate taking the time to write in it. The blogging higher-ups would tell me that I shouldn’t be this open and honest while blogging and maybe they are right, but I have always gotten good responses while bearing my soul, as scary as it is.

So I am going to attempt to revive this blog. I don’t need to have advertising, I’m not looking to get paid for this, all I believe that I want is to be an inspiration to someone who is looking to lose weight and wants to revive his or her exercise/fitness life. If nothing else happens and all I get to do is share my experiences with the interwebs then so be it! For those of you reading, please comment either on this blog or on Facebook when I share it to FB. It would make me happier to know if people are actually interested in reading my stuff.

Lets get started: here goes!

1. What’s been going on for the past several months?

The last several months have been crazy. If you’ve been following along with my photoblog, I got a job as a photographer for a wire service agency, Icon Sportswire . They had me shooting professional sports off an on all summer long. I think that most of July and August was spent at Busch Stadium photographing the Cardinals. I don’t think I shot all that many games as it feels like but between shooting games and working my real job at the hospital, I haven’t had all that much time to write or any energy to workout.

Here’s a little secret, I’ve actually been rather lazy up until this last month when it comes to working out. One of the things I’ve found out is that the more you exercise, the more energy you actually have. It is the most paradoxical thing I’ve ever come across, but it works.

2. Have I been exercising at all or just sitting on the couch eating bon-bon’s?

Ok, so I don’t even think I’ve ever eaten a bon-bon, but I definitely have eaten my fair share of crap. When I went to my health-care convention last December in Orlando, FL, I weighed in at 256ish. This summer I gained almost all of the weight that I lost when I was getting married. I had had enough. What I was doing wasn’t working. Before I start into what has been going on in the last few months, here is the little that I was doing this summer.

From the beginning of May and throughout the summer my buddy, Jeff and I had been running/walking once per week-ish after I got off work. It was going okay...well it actually kinda sucked since that was the only exercise I was getting in a week. I liked exercising at night after work so I joined Planet Fitness in Ballwin and guess how many times I actually went? Once. The one time I went was good I did some running, but it ended up being too far from my house and I never went. There was nothing wrong with the gym, in fact, I liked the gym it was just too far from my house and thus I didn’t use it. The one thing that I did like about the gym that I was unable to use was their Planet Fitness Biggest Loser 30 min Express Workout. Basically, the workout is a giant circuit that is supposed to only take 30 min. You are given a timer in the form of a stop light. On green you work and red you rest. You alternate between the steppers and the circuit machines. It looked like a killer workout if you followed the whole thing from start to finish.


So where am I now? Well, after getting sick and tired of being this way and not doing anything about it, I decided to start up our Biggest Loser competition at work. It’s going ok. I’m not winning but I’m not losing either, the competition - I am losing weight very very very slowly.

I’ve been going to Gold’s Gym in St. Peters which has really helped me get back into the swing of working out. I went there because my wife and I got a 3 month groupon deal and figured we couldn’t pass it up. I’ve been doing cardio and circuit work including a few kettlebell swings. I think that I strained a muscle in my lower back from the kettlebell swings so I’ve taken a few days off. Hopefully this week I will be able to start working on my sprint triathlon training. I’ll let you all know in a few weeks how things are going.

Thanks for reading as always. Cheers!