Weight for It, Weight for It
My weight, it seems, has plateaued at about 177 pounds. Though the masochist who created the Body Mass Index tells me I’m still “overweight” (unless I’m very generous in estimating my height), from a health and, well, vanity standpoint, I’m satisfied at 177.
I do suspect, however, that maximizing my speed will require some additional weight loss. Although, now that I think about it, when my then eight-year-old son [name redacted] and I raced down the water slides at Great Wolf Lodge a few years ago (back when catching a communicable disease at a water park was only a probability, not a certainty), I demolished him. Why ? Because I outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds. Paraphrasing Newton (or someone), an object in motion stays in motion and the fatter an object is, the faster it will go down a hill. Should I be gaining weight? Something to bookmark for further research.
The cute diver I married says she doesn’t want me to get too skinny; wants me to “still” be able to protect her. She should’ve thought about that when she married a diver. The only punch I’ve ever thrown was when [name redacted] and I decided to buy some gloves and box behind our dorm sophomore year. We wailed for several seconds, realized how exhausting boxing is, and held a joint press conference to announce our retirements from boxing. I’ll give it a solid effort, but make no mistake: my protective ability depends almost entirely on Divine Intervention.
Physics research and spousal opinions on hold, I decide to see how much the world’s fastest 5k runners weigh. Ugandan Joshua Cheptegei is the current world record holder. He covered the distance in twelve minutes, thirty-five seconds. I assume that’s a typo. Or else Ugandan minutes are longer than American minutes. The Internet tells me Cheptegei is 5’6” and 115 pounds. This rabbit hole was a mistake.
Maybe I should stick to Americans; compare myself to some meat-and-potato types like myself. Bernard Lagat is the American record holder for the 5k on the track. Twelve minutes, fifty-three seconds. (“What took you so long, Bernie?”) He’s listed at 5’8” and 134 pounds.
Cheptegiei and Lagat are both shorter than me. I’m a towering 5’10”. We’re still not in apples-to-apples territory. Ben True is the American record holder for the road 5k. Thirteen minutes, twenty seconds. He’s 6’0” (the same height as me if I round up to the nearest foot). Now we’re talkin’. 164 pounds. Crap. The writing is on the wall that an ideal running weight for me is likely somewhere in the 150s. This conflicts with my ideal Oreo consumption, which is nightly. *Sigh*