"What are you, dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Batman!"

Well, today marks me hopping right back on the saddle, once more with feeling. And how.

After 10 days of not smoking, I fell off the wagon recently, but I'm going to grit my teeth and wade right back in and whatever other metaphor I can think of to muddy that statement up a bit. It's amazing how myopic I can be; those first three days of withdrawal are absolute hell, but they're not enough to dissuade me that, shucks, one cigarette couldn't hurt. That one turns into two turns into five, and then I'm buying a pack. You'd think I'd be smarter than that. But time and time again, I've outstupided myself.

I just got back from a short run—enough to make my still-tender ankle throb a bit but not enough to land me back on crutches. I definitely wasn't up for a full 5k over lunch today, but spending some time getting trail mud all over my new shoes was terrific in its own right, even if I ended up walking about a full third of the few miles I did manage to pound out in order to baby my ankle.

Tonight, I'm going to attempt kickboxing again. And this time, no matter how withdrawal-y I am, I am going to spit out the piece of gum I'm chewing. Yes, it's occurred to me that when I injured myself, I did so because I was chewing gum—and that too uncoordinated to chew gum and kick at the same time.

I did it! I finally killed Batman! In front of a bunch of vulnerable, disabled kids!!! Now get me Santa Claus!

That there's a quote from the Joker instead of Batman, because I'm feeling a little purplish. This picture's a few days old, and I can assure you my foot is whole lot more black and blue, although the swelling has gone down a ton:



I'm healing very fast, which means that either the doctor was mistaken about the severity of my sprain or I've got Wolverine-like healing abilities. I've been able to walk without crutches for the past few days, getting around fairly well. My foot is still too swollen on which to jam a shoe, so I've been set up with the glorious sartorial choice of a running shoe on my left foot and an Ace wrap, gel splint and sandal on my right. I may be crippled, but at least I get to look stupid while being so.

The good news—and it is good news—is that it's been a week since I've smoked. This has made for topsy-turvy moods, and, since I haven't been able to exercise as an outlet, that topsy-turviness mainly trends toward bitchiness. My commute to work, a normally 20-minute affair chock-full of some of the dumbest drivers in the state ("Hold on a sec, rush hour traffic. I'm-a turnin' my Hummer into the Chick-Fil-A parkin' lot. Nows, I know the drive-through is full, so you'll jus' haveta wait while I stick out into the road for 10 or 15 minutes to get me a chicken sammich. These colors don't run."), which has, in my nicotine-deprived state, turned my vehicle into a maelstrom of creative profanity. But I've been good! I haven't cheated once (what we perennial ex-smokers call "chipping"), and I've done it without the patch or Zyban or any of the crap I used in recent attempts. I've reason to be proud for that, and I'll be much happier when I can actually start exercising again.

Tonight I'm going to attempt whatever sort of core workout I can manage without stressing my ankle. I assume this will include push-ups and sit-ups and, I don't know, hopping up and down on one leg, or something. But I've been eating like a crazy person, and it's time to start working some of it off. Go-go setback.

Nothing matters, except the mission.

Yep. Yessiree. I am out of commission for a few weeks, which I can chalk up only to hubris or stupidity or plain bad luck.

Last week was supposed to be my last hurrah of drinking and smoking and treating my body like poo. I did my last pub quiz, smoked my last cigarette on Thursday. My new running shoes arrived via Zappos on Friday. I went for a 5k run on Saturday, feeling terrific and eagle-eyed and looking ahead to a future of being tanned and lithe and runner-y—albeit scowly from lack of nicotine—and then went to my Saturday kickboxing session and, ten minutes in, promptly sprained the hell out of my ankle.

It made a sound like a handful of Rice Krispies being crushed, and two minute after, it looked like I had a grapefruit attached to my leg. I went to the doctor on Sunday and had X-rays done. He said that although it looks like I might have chipped my fibula, there's no fracture there, just a sprain, but still put me into a gel splint and ordered me off me feet for four to six weeks.

This sucks. Although I can walk today, or at least approximate one via hobbling on the corner of my splint since I suck at using crutches, I'm still more or less immobile, and the setback has put me in the foulest of moods. But there's some sort of lesson here, I guess, although I'm too pissy to care what it is.

Stupid sprain.

I am night. I am vengeance. It's almost my birthday.

Despite my lackluster posting, things are going well. I've lost another five pounds or so and my wife and I are training for the Denver marathon in October (training: reading books and occasionally running). My kickboxing this week has been productive and awesome, and I'm getting to the point where I'm one of the more advanced people in the class, as can be evinced by my thunderclap-like punches. POW! ZAM! ZIFF! And so on.

It's my 31st birthday tomorrow, and my sister sent me this pleasingly Dadaist e-card:



(A lush orchestral version of "Jingle Bells" plays while you read it. Over and over and over. This speaks volumes to the fact that my ingrained silliness is in fact genetic.)

Last year at this time, I was jobless and without a drivers license, planning on spending a month in a tiny cabin in the middle of winter to figure things out a bit. I'm happy to report that things are much improved, and a lot of that I can attribute directly to this Batman project and the mentality that goes along with it, namely, "Hey, wouldn't it be a great idea if I stopped abusing my body and instead tried to treat it well? Even improve it a bit?"

Speaking of which, I'm going to try to quit smoking next week, after my retirement from being a pub quizmaster. That's sort of an important step in, say, learning to run 26 miles. Wouldn't you say?

I can see 15 ways to kill you from this position. But I'm not going to kill you. I'm here to bring you to justice.

I spent the latter half of last week alternately puking and being lazy. I did go for a few runs, but because of my torpor—and the combat gym being closed on Saturday—I didn't make kickboxing again until Monday.

But hey, this week has been terrific so far, and I'm losing weight again and feeling light and strong and healthy. Monday and yesterday, my kicks were hard and fast and I was balanced on the balls of my feet even as I was peppering the mat with droplets of my sweat. I ellipticalled and pumped iron and did circuits and in general pushed myself, and I'll continue doing that until I find another reason to be lazy.

My wife read Born to Run (and I'm actually re-reading it now, I loved it so much) and she went onto Amazon and ordered a crap-ton of books about running. She wants to run marathons now, and I want to join her until we are a nut-brown pair of wild-eyed running psychopaths, fleet of foot and possessing 1% body fat, our hair and eyelashes bleached white from the time we spend under the sun. We'll see how this works out.

I need, need, need to make a full five kickboxing sessions this week, to blast through the five-or-so pound region I've inhabited for the past few weeks, just sort of bobbing up and down in it as I lose and then regain the weight. I get through that, and I've only got 15 pounds left to go. My belly is being stubborn; although I've lost a lot of midsection fat, it's the beer roll that continued to stubbornly resist the ridiculous amount of ab work I've been doing. I shall defeat you yet.

So I'm sort of at a crossroads, training-wise. The fitness kickboxing I've been doing is very, very good for me, yes, and I'll continue doing it. But if I want to get better, I need to get more intense muay thai and MMA training. The question is: do I want to? I have very little interest in fighting anybody, in the ring or otherwise, and while the self-defense aspect would come in handy if I ever found myself in a crumbling alley in the Reagan-era Lower East Side, I'm doing all of this for my own health and well-being, not to prove anything or to compete with anyone. Taking additional fighting classes would set me on the competitive course, I think. I'll mull that while you prepare for my impending 31st birthday.

I'm a detective. If I worship anything, it's logic.

My quads and triceps are killing me today, thanks to a pretty awesome workout yesterday in which we did circuits and then roughly 10,000 squat/touch-kick combos. This followed an extremely packed Monday night kickboxing session, with a ton of adorable newbies who were aghast at the things they were being asked to do. That aghastness fades into mild surprise, I wanted to tell them.

I just finished reading Born to Run, a Christmas gift from my sister. Now, I have to admit that I wasn't at all excited to read this book; I've always gone running for necessity only, and nobody has any business calling a book Born to Run unless it's about Springsteen. And I've always taken issue with runners' culture, which, like much of Colorado outdoor culture, focuses on gear. "If I can only spend thousands of dollars on equipment designed to heighten my enjoyment of the outdoors, I'll really enjoy the outdoors," goes that credo. "And how can someone possibly enjoy the outdoors without ripstop nylon and Gore-Tex and a North Face colostomy bag and fly-fishing gear designed by astronauts?"

Running is, in other words and like the hippie-industrial complex, a pastime or avocation that fetishizes the equipment you use to do it. I think it's horseshit, and my assumption was that Born to Run would make me roll my eyes and throw it away after ten pages. But goddamn if my sister wasn't correct—and I found myself doing something I only do with books I really love: limiting my reading to a few dozen pages a day to make it last longer. It's sort of a life-changing book, and it did exactly what my marathoner sister hoped. It made me want to run. Like, not just two miles around the track in the morning, grumbling the whole way. Not five miles or ten or twenty six point two. It made me want to run hundreds of miles at a clip, because that's what my body was designed to do.

That's the central thesis of the book—that humans were engineered from our evolutionary origins as a running species, and that we do ourselves disservice by ignoring that. We are supposed to be lithe, sinewy creatures, trotting lightly with bare feet over tracks hundreds of miles long. Our bodies function best this way. Our psyches function best this way. Our societies function best this way. And you'll forgive me for drooling the way I am over this, but for the present I'm less Batman and more The Flash.

So. I'm going to run. Or, more specifically, I'm going to run again, and reincorporate this into my workouts—which, although I've been doing religiously, have seemed more and more sort of humdrum and normal over the past few weeks. I'm not going to buy expensive shoes or marathon nipple-tape or carbohydrate gels. I'm just going to run, barefoot if need be, and then I'm going to run some more.

And then I'm going to quit smoking.

Brave new world, which has such yutzes in it.

Back from the regular gym for one of my lunchtime sessions, elliptical and Ratatouille. Had a brutal kickboxing session yesterday during which I almost passed out—which might have been from either the lack of food I'd had that day or the vodka I drank the night before at pub quiz. Generally, a hangover is entirely banished through the sweating, but it didn't seem to work that way yesterday.

I'm still losing weight, which is terrific; I stepped on the scale yesterday morning and was shocked to see "192" looking back at me. I think it was a fluke, though.

Tonight: kickboxing, then some comfort food, as it's still cold as balls.

You are part of the night, just like me. We're not afraid of the dark—we come alive in it. We're thrilled by it.

Forgive the radio silence. A new year, and the new me still continues to percolate up. I'm happy to report that I'm now back where I started before my long Christmas holiday; despite big meals, long junk-food road trips, my Great-Aunt Dolly's lasagna via my sister, Christmas ham and riced potatoes and gravy, gooey Chinese take-out, beer, whiskey, short ribs with sauerkraut, port-wine cheese, chicken a la king and a trip to Matt's Bar (home of the Jucy Lucy!), I gained only four pounds. Not bad, and definitely not as much weight as I feared I'd put on.

But I did keep busy while on vacation, and tried to keep myself as physically active as possible. There was the snowboarding and the skiing and the ice-skating, all of them with a surprising dearth of wobbliness given that I've done none of them in over a decade, and then were the floor exercises. Jackie from PPCS was nice enough to email me a workout—something I could do without a bag or proper equipment—and my wife was nice enough to yell things at me while I sweated and groaned on the floor in front of the Christmas tree while the dog slapped me in the jaw with his wagging tail and Man Vs. Food played in the background.

I didn't do any running in Minnesota, since it was alternately blizzarding or cold as hell, and since neither my run-crazy sister nor my run-crazy cousin goaded me into it, for reasons of pregnancy and hangover, respectively. A good trip home, all in all, and I'm glad I came back only incrementally more pudgy than when I left.

Because I drank so often while in Minnesota, I haven't really felt the urge to do so since I've been back, which meant that I was the boring sober guy on New Years Eve who, instead of having fun, whined and went home by 11 PM in order to watch Back to the Future. The wife and I went out on Saturday for a fancy-ass steakhouse meal, and I did have a few glasses of wine then, but malbec is a far cry from bourbon shots. Oh, and I had a mimosa on Sunday and then took a nap.

I'm back in the groove workout-wise, with my goal being five kickboxing sessions a week. I'll need a few weeks of this—and a number of muay Thai classes—before I'm ready for Combat Conditioning, I've decided. We'll see how that goes.

I have 20 pounds to go, which may be an ambitious estimate, but one that I think I can accomplish in the next few months. It's hard for me to say what my ideal weight even is these days, since I've yo-yoed so much in recent years. At my skinniest as an adult, I weighed 150 pounds, but that was stupid skinny—Aaronrexic, my coworkers called me at the time. I also had no muscle whatsoever, just willowy fatless limbs onto which I could pull the teeny-tiny women's jeans I wore. My hipsterdom deserved a good slapping, and I got it, in a way, through completely fucking up my metabolism by never eating. I've been gaining weight steadily in the six or seven years since then. So 150 is too skinny, especially given the considerable amount of muscle I've been growing like some creepy sweaty petri dish. I'm shooting for 175. When I hit 175 on the scale, we'll take another look and see what needs to be done. I imagine that throwing villains off of cathedrals will be part of it.

Oh! Before I forget, I've obtained several Batman-helpful books over the past few months that I will now tell you about, because what are you going to do, stop reading? The first of these, which I ordered from Amazon about when I started, is The Batman Handbook, a truly goofy read which has helpful little sections on, say, how to fight someone using a whip or how to drive on two wheels or how to bulletproof your car. In that similar vein, my mother-in-law got me The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, which is really handy if you want to know how to escape from a locked trunk or ask someone, in French, to hand you a towel to mop up all the blood. The last was a terrific memoir by former Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, Born Round, in which he talks about his lifelong struggle with weight. Yeah, I know—Lifetime movie blah blah blah—but it's engagingly written and Bruni thinks about food in much the same way I do. (He also got, like me, super-fat.) These have been my dorky little companions.

Today: a regular-gym workout during lunch and then, possibly, a muay Thai class before pub quiz. We'll see.

I think I'm starting to sound more like Moriarty than Sherlock Holmes.

I have been lazing off on the Batblog for a while, and this may be just because things that until recently seemed so novel—my shiny new muscles, my diet, my ability to climb stairs with neither huffing or puffing—all seem sort of normal now. This will change soon, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.

So, had a good rest of the week, exercise-wise, although I didn't work out at all on Friday, due to a work holiday party during my lunch and then a show to play in the evening. While my workouts generally only take up about two hours a day, they occasionally run head-on into my work or social life, and I get unreasonably irked every time this happens. But Friday was an altogether okay version of that; playing music is something I'll never, ever stop doing, even if it sometimes steps on the toes of my regimen. Maybe I'll make a Bat-band.

Another kickboxing class on Saturday (remember when I said I'd do it three times a week? Yeah, now I feel lazy if I don't get four or five in). On my way out, the owner of the place asked me, "So how is this working for you?" I grinned and told him, "This has been just amazing. I've lost 25 pounds and I'm getting all muscley and I really couldn't have done it without you guys." He and his co-owner were amazed and pleased and asked me if I'd write them a testimonial. And then Tony said that I'm probably ready to start Combat Conditioning.

Combat Conditioning is, you'll remember, the very first class that I ever took, the one for hardcore fighters, that Tony let me sit in on once while then shooing me over to kickboxing because of my sissiness. While not as cardio-heavy, Combat Conditioning is muy intense, and leans a lot more toward the personal-training side of things, with a ton of strength, flexibility, speed and technique instruction. I'm flattered that he thinks I'm ready for it, and I have yet to decide if I'll give it a shot today or go to the regular gym for a half-hour of elliptical and Deadwood-on-my-iPhone instead. CC will up my toughness considerably, and I hope I'm ready to take it on.

Today's my last day of work before I hop in the car and troll northeast to Minnesota for Christmas. I'm wondering if there's an unhealthier holiday than Minnesotan Christmas, which is analagous to mainlining gravy with one hand while pouring a mixture of beer and half and half down your throat while giving yourself a ham enema and snorting cinnamon rolls. And will I partake in this because of tradition? Bet your ass, I will. But I'm also keen on spending a lot of time doing outdoorsy exercise: ice-skating and skiing and running in the snow a lot like in Rocky IV. And, failing that, I can always make my wife count out 30-second increments in a bored tone of voice while I do cherry-pickers or burpies or V-ups or baby bounces or any of the catalogue of little floor exercises I do and she watches What Not to Wear. I know I'll regain some weight in Minnesota—there's simply no way I can't, given the folksy gluttony that is my birthright. But I can do my best to minimize that, and you know what I've kind of figured out? I'm not in bad shape. I would daresay my shape is okay.

We impose meaning on the chaos of our lives. We create form, morality, order. It's a choice we have to make every second of every minute of every day.

Had a great kickboxing session yesterday. My kicks are getting fast and hard and explosive, a quick pivot on my front foot, swivel of the hips, then my foot totally shows up in a place it wasn't a moment ago, presenting itself with a loud, loud SMACK on the bag. My form and technique are improving, and my knee problems from a few weeks ago have disappeared as I've gotten better. Likewise for my punches; yesterday, the instructor had to keep dragging my bag back onto the mat from my surprisingly effective left hooks. All of this is stuff I never would have thought I'd be thinking or writing about, a few months ago. Me? Punching? Weird.

This isn't a mud pit. It's an operating table, and I'm the surgeon.

Well, I've apparently powered through my 20-pound-or-one-month malaise. After Friday and Saturday kickboxing—both of which were just brutal and made for a sore n' hobbling sort of weekend—I found that I was losing weight again. And I've continued to do so since, at sort of ridiculously fast rate. Since Friday, I've lost five pounds, and that's with a weekend of light-ish drinking and not-so-great eating (I made tacos on Sunday night. How many did I have? Six. That's how many). I'm to the point where I'm unembarassed to share my actual weight with you, dear Bat-Readers: 196. That's with me having lost 25 pounds. Let's do the math together. Let's see: five plus six, carry the one—that adds up, let me figure. Oh, yeah, it adds up to: fucking fat. 196 is too fat for my frame, too, let's not have any illusions about that. But that 196 has been hard-won, and it also means that I'm past the halfway point for my goal weight.

My workouts have long become habit, but now they're also something I really miss, and it says something about my retarded resolve that if I miss a day of kickboxing, I'm overtaken with the same kind of guilt generally meant for child-murderers. A great deal of this does, I think, have to do with the fact that I'm becoming simply fascinated with what's happening to me, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.* It's like going through a second, more bad-ass puberty. Where did these bulges come from? What does it mean? What is happening to me? WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?

It sort of goes without saying that I'll be punching and kicking the shit out of things again today. Then a regular gym workout, then I'm going to join a friend for a drink, because I can do that and what are you gonna do? Try to stop me? Ha.


*Apologies to Patton Oswalt.

Not you, Robin. They have strict licensing laws in this country. A boy of your age is not allowed in a drinking tavern.

Feeling great today, and against all odds, I've shed another pound.

Kickboxing was excellent yesterday; normally the class is run by one of two female instructors, but yesterday, Tony, the co-owner of the place, ran it. Instead of the usual workout, we were treated to a while of technique instruction. I can honestly say my kicks are coming with more force and accurary than they were yesterday morning. After that, it was a long period of dancing around the bag on the balls of our feet, keeping our heads forever moving, while Tony yelled out things for us to do. A great workout and more fun than doing, say, ladders. But damn, am I sore—all that time on the balls of my feet is like college for my calves. Calf-college, we'll call it.

I'm getting impatient with myself. I figure, weight-loss-wise, I'm about halfway to where I need to be. And I want to be where I need to be, you know, now. But I'll just take a breath, keep working hard and stay on the trolley. Regular gym and kickboxing again tonight, and again-again Saturday, and then I'll probably take Sunday off. Good times.

It's called a compound fracture, rapist. It'll never heal. Not right it won't. You'll remember me every time the air goes wet and cold.

It is -11° here. Last night with windchill is was -30°. Clearly some supervillain has travelled from the future, built a weather machine and tried to forestall my training by making it so cold I want to do nothing but stay inside and eat great bowls of pasta, thereby fattening myself up. You won't win, Hypothetical Supervillain From the Future.

Anyway, I am stalled at the same weight as last week, missing my goal by two pounds. Several people have told me that this tends to happen, roughly twenty pounds or a month in, and to just keep plugging. My body, in other words, has wised up to me, and is trying its damndest to hold onto its fat stores like Scrooge McDuck onto his gold. So I will keep on plugging and work through this.

I missed Monday kickboxing because there was a bout of layoffs at my company, and instead of kickboxing, I felt like drowning my survivor's guilt in drink. So I did. This was obviously a weak move, and even as I drove to the bar to meet some friends after work, I felt guilty. About an hour later, I got a text from the owner of the combat gym, but by then I'd already had a vodka. Mas de guilt.

I did, however, have a great workout yesterday, and discovered a neat little inner reserve that lets me throw my punches with a great deal more speed and force. It wasn't that I was necessarily pulling punches before—although after half an hour of nonstop punching they certainly didn't have a lot of weight behind them—but that I never really felt it necessary to punch as hard as I can. The combat gym has hardened and given ridiculous heft to my arms, and with my newfound punch, that'll only grow.

Getting out of the shower this morning, I looked in the mirror and was amazed to find that you can actually see the outlines of stomach muscles on my torso. Not down where my slowly-melting gut still is, of course, but higher up, there's the phantom of six pack growing. There's still plenty to be done, of course, but my pear-shaped body is gradually taking on the a V shape. Or, failing that, maybe an H.

Non-punchy workout today at lunch, and then pub quiz tonight. Since I missed Monday kickboxing, I'll go tomorrow, see if I can fit in a session on Friday night, and then hit it Saturday, as well. No rest for the tubby.

But wherever my grave is... someone's standing on it ... waiting on it ... stomping the hell out of it. Someone who wants me to eat ice cream.

Google totally stole my idea! (Yes, I, too stole my idea. Shut up or I'll throw you off a cathedral.) Google is now my archnemesis, and will soon be thrown off a cathedral.



It is far too ridiculously cold out: -3 before windchill according to my iPhone. This is Colorado, not Minnesota, so you'll excuse me for knitting my bat-brows together in consternation that I have to worry about my van starting. Snow is fine. Dump it all day every day as far as I'm concerned. But this kind of weather? It's horse-hockey, is what it is, and I'm going to throw Old Man Winter off a cathedral.

So, I discovered yesterday that kickboxing is a terrific cure for a mild hangover; my tiredness and vague sense of ill-being just melted right the hell away after an hour of punching and kicking. I would not recommending using this cure for anything more than a mild hangover, however, as it's likely to end in copious vomiting.

So yes, I drank at pub quiz the night before last and ended up having more than I'd planned to. My reasons for this are certainly not good, but I was in sort of a celebrational mood, what with the full moon and the wintery weather and the Christmas tree with which I shared the stage. Seasonal joy turned into not enough sleep, but I'm pleased with myself for going to kickboxing despite my tiredness.

I am stalled at the weight I've had since Wednesday, no doubt in part to alcohol consumption and my desire to hibernate given the weather. This means I have three pounds more to go before Monday. I think I can do it; I'm going to Saturday kickboxing tomorrow, and I might stick around for Big Boy Boxing if I'm not too wrecked after that. A few runs, eating decently and some gym time today should get me there. Otherwise, if I'm looking for someone to throw off a cathedral, I might as well look in a mirror. [Pause for effect.] Let's do this.

They say that when you kill a man you not only take away what he was, but all he will ever be. Gross.

Another two pounds down. This week has been pretty productive one, although at kickboxing and the gym yesterday I felt like I was moving slowly. That might have been due to the fact that I didn't really eat much until later in the evening.

I have quiz tonight, so I will only get a regular-gym workout in today during my lunch, and then back to punching and kicking things again tomorrow. I need new gloves; the 14-ounce Walmart ones I bought are hopeless uncomfortable, cheaply made, and ridiculous. I'll scan the TOTALLY XXXXTREEEEME! MMA outfitter catalogue I took from the gym and get something a little more appropriate. Yes, I am now mail-ordering fighting apparel.

I am trying to sublimate the gorge of smugness that overtakes me whenever I come back from the gym. "Oh, look," I think. "Here I am, all sweaty and doing good for my body, while the drones eat their Carl's Jr. and grow like flabby fungi under the florescent lights." This is lousy of me and I have to cut it out.

Example: A few weeks ago, a Chik Fil-A opened up down the street from where I work. Since the day it opened, there's been a line of cars snaking from the drive-through out and into the next parking lot. People cannot wait to get their hands on a chicken sandwich! So, coming back from the gym one day, I commented on it and one of my coworkers said, "Hey, I like Chik Fil-A."

"Oh yeah?" I snorted. I then went to my computer and called up a picture of mechanically separated chicken, which I pointed out looks exactly like strawberry soft-serve. I will now share that picture with you and ensure that you'll never eat another chicken nugget:



Gross, right? Anyway, the grossness is not the point. The point is that I can't let myself become alienated from these people I am supposed to be protecting. Or, more succinctly: stop being an asshole, me.

You needn't be out there on the edge anymore. You needn't be alone. We don't have to kill each other ... for Muscle Milk.

My training continues. The form of my terrible shadow is coalescing. I accomplish this through coughing.

A post-Thanksgiving workout and kickboxing session reduced me to splinters last night, if splinters sweated and coughed a lot and spluttered. This is due to either: A) My excessive smoking over the holiday weekend; or B) The tiny salad I ate about an hour before kickboxing because I was ravenous and I figured, hey, an hour should be long enough so that my meal digests to a point where I don't throw up all over my bag gloves. Whatever the case, a not especially rough workout had me light-headed and weak, and then I got to hustle off to band practice, unfed but for Muscle Milk.

I've grown accustomed to the slightly more svelt silhouette I now throw, and my stomach muscles have grown hard beneath the slowly-melting gut. My wife delights in prodding my brand-new muscles, and she said the other day, "You know, you look substantial." "As opposed to what? As opposed to just fat?" I asked her. She sort of blushed, but I took her meaning.

I peeled off two pounds yesterday, so I'm well on my way to my goal for this week. My other goal is to have, from yesterday, another 20 pounds gone by Christmas. This is ambitious, but totally doable, as long as I take care of myself and keep pushing. In a few weeks, I'll be in shape enough to start actual sparring, which will be of further good to me, if bruising can be construed as a good thing. But I'm excited to get some real combat experience. Remember, the supervillains of Coz ain't gonna punch themselves into oblivion.

No, Bane. This time I break you—on the elliptical.

I am absolutely amazed that our four-day Thanksgiving bacchanal only resulted in a two-pound weight gain. Between 18 adults, we ate—no shit—twelve pounds of bacon. More like a baconnal! Bwahaha!

In any case, a very good time, and I didn't eat nearly as poorly as I could have, all told. I stayed away from beer and ate fruit for breakfast and did some floor exercises and went for a polar bear twin in Mary's Lake and took a four-mile hike and was altogether more active that I could have been. But still, time to start anew that weight-shaving, today with a lunchtime trip to the gym and then kickboxing again tonight. The good news that I've learned from my Batman-ing so far is that I'm capable of taking weight off, and with surprising alacrity, when I stick to my diet and work hard. I will lose another seven pounds before the week is over. This is my goal. I will also run tomorrow, which I failed to do today because I could not be bothered to wake up early enough.

And go.

It’s not Batman that makes you worthwhile, it’s the other way around. Never tell yourself anything different.

Kickboxing was a rough one yesterday. We eschewed our usual amount of bag time in favor of circuits. Circuits go like this:

There are six stations set up, at each of which you are to perform a specific exercise. Examples include box dips, squats with a 40-pound weight, cherry pickers with a heavy-ass medicine ball, box jumps, etc. Simple, right? You are allotted one minute at each of these stations, in which you are to perform that exercise with full intensity. (Stopping to catch your breath is the enemy.) Then, quickly to the next station! And to the next! And the next! Don't stop! And so on, until you've done the full circuit. Then you get 20 seconds to get a drink of water, and then you do another circuit. And then another one. And then you fall down on the mat and cry like a child.

Needless to say, a very good workout, and I did another one after work, with half an hour on the elliptical and some weights. I also showed my wife some of the circuit exercises, and she looked at me, the sidelong glint saying, You are crazy. Why would you voluntarily do this to yourself? It's happening—the obsession with my mission has already begun to alienate me from others. Don't worry, though: my secret identity of Thousandaire Playboy Aaron Retka is still safe. For now.

Anyway. I'll hit the gym again today to help preemptively squash the zillion-calorie meals I'll be eating this weekend. And if running at 9,000 feet ain't good for the heart, I don't know what is.

All men have limits. They learn what those limits are and then they learn not to exceed them. I ignore mine.

Well, I thought for sure that I'd come home to Florida to find that I'd regained a few pounds, and damn if I wasn't correct. The problem was lack of exercise, too much beer, and unhealthful airport food, all of which conspired to tip my scale back up a few pounds. But it's okay, since I jumped happily back onto the wagon yesterday and felt subsequently great. I've found that I am more animated, more active, and of a much better disposition when I'm eating well, working out and not drinking, and the Florida trip enforced that nicely.

I worked out yesterday at the non-combat gym during my lunch, and the elliptical and weight sweat felt like coming home, even if I had to deal with the Dilettante. The Dilettante is a familiar figure at the office building gym where I work out for free, courtesy of my wife. He's a middle-aged man who resembles a hobbit, with little legs and a round, round belly, and he always wears a sweatband, though the colors of those sweatbands tend to change. I call him the Dilettante because he will not stay at a machine or weight station for more than a minute, ever, just bopping merrily from one thing to the next—doing five reps at the chest press, five at the leg press, five at the rowing machine, and so on. If this sounds cute, it sort of is, except that it's difficult to get on any certain machine because he's seemingly at all of them simultaneously, and cute morphs into annoying. "Jesus, just pick something, Dilettante," I want to tell him. "Anything. Just spend more than five minutes doing one thing. Please?" That's the Dilettante.

Another figure is the Gym Cop, whom my wife tells me is actually chief of security for the Alamo Building and Plaza of the Rockies and who is, she assures me, actually quite a nice guy. My problem with Gym Cop is that he, a brawny, brush-cut dude with a Taz tattoo, likes to stare with apparent menace at any man in the gym. He is warm with the women, of course, but any man he views as a rulebreaker, or a vandal, or possibly a rapist. Rulebreakers all, in other words, and he'll be damned if rules will be broken on his watch. He tends to hover near the free weights, staring, while I huff and puff and finally just decide to leave because I don't like him staring. This means he wins. Both the Dilettante and Gym Cop will be my archnemeses when I become Batman.

So, that aside, I had a great kickboxing session last night. My endurance is increasing and my technique is getting better, thanks to helpful little asides from the instructor or those more schooled in the form. Last night, it was two Special Forces guys who did the whole class in weight vests who helped me along, showing me the proper way to curl my toes back during a push-kick, which feels a lot more balanced and powerful. I go back during lunch today for some more, and then tomorrow I go up to Estes Park for the annual nerd Thanksgiving outing we call Gobblerfest. During the Gobbles, I'm going to try my best to stay on the diet—except for, duh, Thanksgiving dinner, since I'm doing three different birds and I will under no circumstance miss eating stuffing. But if I can watch my alcohol intake and try to eat well and go out for runs, I should be good. Better than good, cuz I'm en route to Batman.

I also started, per the request of a few different people, taking photos to monitor my progress. None of you will ever see these photos until I'm in shape, and possibly not even then, since I'm terrified you'd sell them to the groundbreaking porn site, Shirtless Fat Guys With Psoriasis. But the photos are good to have, if even just for myself.

And when you're sitting here alone in the middle of the night, unsleeping in the dark, remember—every breath you take you owe to me.

Whee, Orlando. The town so nice they named it once, built a shitload of theme parks and chain restaurants, slapped a smiley face on it and called it a day.

So. I just got back from the hotel's exercise room, which has hilariously, semi-dangerously outdated equipment. I was happy to see an elliptical, so I climbed on the thing and starting working, only to hear loud clunks coming from the floor. I peered down and saw huge, heavy iron gears, rusted and massive, like something you would have seen during the Inquisition, upon which this thing was balanced. The sound was so loud that I was sure I was waking up the adjacent rooms' residents, so I opted for the creaky treadmill instead. My knee is feeling better, but even so it hurt a bit to run and I didn't want to aggravate it, so I settled for the exercise bike, did about half an hour on that and exited drenched in sweat. Go, humidity.

This is the first exercise, save for some sit-ups and stretches, that I've had since being here. I'm sure I'll return in worse shape, even though I'm doing my damndest not to drink and to eat well. That being said, last night I had something called "Shrimp Cargot," my thinking that it'd be simple and not too unhealthy. Imagine my surprise (and secret delight) at seeing the dozen shrimp covered in about a pound of cheese and butter. Did I eat it? Yeah—I didn't want to be rude, after all, since this was an expensed meal.

The night before was more of the same: an overpriced seafood place where I went for a mixed grill and got about $12 worth of grilled fish and shellfish for about $40 along with some steamed vegetables (only $6 extra!). But hey, expensed, right?

A vignette from last night: We finished dinner around 9 PM, and we were both exhausted and not wanting to head out to the very drunken conference parties going on around town, so we came back to the hotel. While I didn't want to go out, I thought drinking a beer by the pool sounded nice, so I headed into the hotel bar and ordered one (a Michelob Ultra, thankyouverymuch). The hotel bar was, first, completely empty, and very, very brightly lit, like a Walmart. Second, a club remix of the new Lady Gaga song was playing very, very loudly. And third, the bartender was so flamboyant, so mincing and lispy, that I assumed he was either A) Making fun of me; or B) Trying on a character, perhaps for the Orlando Dinner Theatre Players' version of The Birdcage. After being on my feet all day, surrounding by flashing lights, this was appropriately surreal. But I drank my beer quietly out in the dark by the pool was was in bed by 10:30.

Now, back to the tradeshow floor. Good times.